Hesam's secret online blog
by GoldSeven
Summary: Hesam Malek's thoughts on his job, his partner, and life in general, from pre-Fugitives to just after Redemption. Rated T for language and violence. Last parts: Hesam works out the last few bits of the puzzle, and Peter finally tells him everything.
1. Strange coincidences, May 2007

**Hesam's secret online blog**

Disclaimer: The opinions presented in this blog

do not represent those of the Regional EMS Council of the New York State Department of Health,

or New York Mercy Heights Emergency Medical Service,

or any of their affiliates.

**Strange coincidences**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 10 May, 2007, 9:32 PM

I had my last day with Jerry DuPont the day before yesterday. After three years, it's a pity he stops working with me, and I don't get why on earth he wants to do more night shifts now (mostly since we get those anyway when we're running doubles). I guess it all has to do with being twenty-two years old, being newly precepted (and single) and wanting to trade patient transfers for stabbings and drunks.

Like I said, I don't get it.

Since he'll still be working for MH EMS, and we'll end up working together again at any rate, we keep our last day mostly unsentimental, apart from when he gets us both an Italian B.M.T. sandwich. It nearly moves me to tears to find he's finally remembered, after three years, that I despise the honey/mustard sauce he keeps asking for, and got me Chipotle Southwest.

We have a couple of quiet calls, too, all in all, a rather quiet day. Lots of time for his newspaper in between calls.

As usual, he reads the sports page and leaves me most of the rest. (Something else I don't get.) I go through the Washington section and find an article entitled "Petrelli promises to clamp down on national security threats."

Jerry catches my disgruntled noise. "What's up?" he asks.

"This Senator Petrelli. He's on the warpath against terrorism again."

"Senator who?"

"Petrelli. He's the junior New York senator."

"Never heard of him. I must have voted for the other guy."

"Gal."

"What?"

"His main opponent was Dena Allen."

Jerry shrugs. "Never heard of her either."

"Because you're a disgrace for your city, that's why."

He wags a finger at me from behind the sports page. "And you wonder why I'm moving to night shifts?"

I shake my head as I read the article. "If this new domestic war on terror becomes even more popular, I guess my brother can stop going by plane altogether."

"Why's that?"

"They kept him at JFK for four hours last winter, trying to find where he was hiding his bomb. He must have been totally their prey pattern. He missed his flight and never even got an apology."

"Did he tell them his brother dons a cape at night and protects the streets of New York City from evildoers?"

"No, he told them next time, he would tape some hot dogs round his waist. Just out of spite."

"Was that before or after they kept him for four hours?"

I scratch my head. "Dunno. He was kinda unclear on the timing."

Jerry laughs, and we get a call for difficulty breathing on 57th.

We actually manage to turn in at a quarter past seven, so after cleaning and restocking, it's half past, and we share one last coffee in the EMT room.

The next day, I work with Karen O'Neill. Her partner, Nicholas Greentree, is off on vacation (and sends in postcards every other day just to gloat. He can't possibly be visiting all the places he sends postcards from. Karen says he's probably staying next to a postcard factory in upstate New York).

It's another slow day, and we get permission to come in for a one-oh-one (that's lunch) around 2 PM. They've got some pretty decent cheesy chicken turnovers in the canteen on Wednesdays. As we head back to our rig and stop by the EMT room to pick up a couple of new run forms, there are a couple of people there. Two of them I've never seen before, a blonde woman and a dark-haired guy. "Ah, fresh meat," Karen says with a grin as she approaches them. I remember someone telling me there would be new paramedics – the service is stocking up on the ALS (Advanced Life Support) cars and is hiring currently.

Supervisor Jackson is there as well; he seems to be showing them round. "This is Shannon," he introduces the woman. "Hesam, this is Peter. I'm going to team you up with him."

We shake hands. He looks like an easy-going fellow. I've got to go back, but we make some small talk – I'm a bit surprised to find he hasn't worked in EMS before, but used to be a nurse (I can't imagine why he switched; certainly can't have been the pay) – when I look at the name tag lying on top of the folded uniform he has over his arm. It reads _P. Petrelli_.

The first thing I actually register is that _Peter Petrelli, Paramedic_ is as good a reason as any to switch to EMS, if only for the alliteration, before I look at his face, trying to find a family resemblance. Damn, yes.

I look at his name tag again, and begin, "Is that…?"

"Yeah," he says. "That's my brother."

I feel like an idiot. He probably gets that all the time, and has probably had it several times today, too. I tell myself that's hardly my fault. If anything, it speaks in my favour that I read newspapers.

Still, the way he rolls his eyes and grins as he says it immediately tells me he probably won't search me for bombs.

Which is a pity, actually. I've always wanted to try that hot dog trick sometime.

.

* * *

Notes:

1. This one's at odds with my fic "Unsung Heroes", where I still assumed that Hesam and Peter weren't working together regularly, but since it's obvious that they do, I retconned. ;)

2. I'll update this one infrequently as the muse descends. And I'm looking forward to it. XD

3. Nooo, I haven't forgotten "Trauma"! Of course not! I've just felt like some "light writing" recently.

Thank you for reading!


	2. Tunnel vision, May 2007

**Tunnel vision**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 14 May, 2007, 10:04 AM

When you have a new partner, you try to show off. Not really consciously, I guess, but you still do it. I've been a paramedic for six years, so you think it shouldn't be too hard to impress a rookie in his first week, right?

Wrong.

I mentioned that Peter used to be a nurse. That means he probably has more medical knowledge than I do, though he says, modestly, that he's forgotten a lot since he hasn't worked as a nurse for half a year. (He doesn't say _what_ he did, either.) He's got some pretty mad IV skills, too. It's hard to impress a guy who can stick a sixteen gauge catheter in the vein of a heroin addict. And even then, he stays modest. When we wheeled said heroin addict into triage, a nurse hardly looked at him and said, "No IV access, I take it?", and all Peter did was point. It wasn't even a smug sort of pointing.

I can't even brag about my knowledge of the NYC side alleys, since Peter has lived in Manhattan for his entire life.

So, naturally, I tried to impress him with my knowledge of NYC drunks, which, typing this here, sounds even feebler than it did last night.

We're sent for an unknown on Canal. "_Unknown_ on _Canal_", particularly at 23:20 PM, is an oxymoron, as that "unknown" is almost always Tommy. Tommy gets drunk every night, and while every EMT in New York City knows him, it's amazing that there are still people in that area who find him sleeping it off and call 911. Must be tourists.

So when this happens, we go, scoop him up, and persuade him to go home if he's responsive, or cart him off to the Alcohol and Drug Recovery Center when he's not. Tommy is usually cooperative, and is a pretty decent sort, as drunks go.

On the way, I tell Peter about Tommy, and share a few anecdotes, like Nick Greentree once responding to the call by getting a taxi to Canal. While he got a good laugh from every medic on duty that night, he also got a reprimand from the supervisor.

Peter shares the laugh, but I can see he's with the supervisor on this one. Wait until you've picked up Tommy for the first dozen times, I think to myself as we pull up on scene.

Tommy sits dizzily against a wall as we arrive. "Hey, Tommy," I say as I crouch on the ground beside him. "How you doing?"

He has trouble focusing. "Hiya, Sam," he says. "M'head hurts." He's been calling me Sam for ages. I actually consider that quite a remarkable feat, considering he has never seen me while he was sober. And "Sam" certainly beats the occasional "Ahmed" I keep getting.

"How much have you been drinking?" I ask him disapprovingly, as Peter sits next to us.

"Ya know," he slurs. "This, an' a bit o' that." He squints at Peter. "Who's that?"

"My new partner, Peter." I check his pupils, and his pulse. As expected, his pupils are dilated; he must have had rather a lot more of this than of that.

"Where's Jerry?"

"He's not on duty today." I give him a pat on the arm. "So, how 'bout it, Tom? Can you walk home, what'ya reckon?"

"Not sure, Sam," he says, his voice almost apologetic.

I take his arm to help him up, but immediately, he starts to wobble. Peter is quick to catch his other arm, and helps me to ease him back down.

"Who's that?" Tommy slurs, looking at Peter.

"His name's Peter." I get on the radio, to call the ADRC and tell them we're coming.

"Where's Jerry?" Tommy asks.

I roll my eyes, as I concentrate on the call, but I can see Peter frowning. He gets out his flashlight and shines it in Tommy's eyes. "Anything unusual happen tonight, Tom?" he asks.

Tommy blinks. "No. Been hitting the booze, I guess."

Peter shoots me a glance that tells me he's concerned, but I put it down to his eagerness to find something, some life to save even if it's just a drunk. I ask if the ADRC have a bed free, and get a positive response. Tommy is well known there, and is never any trouble.

I put my portable back on my belt. "We can take him to the ADRC," I tell Peter, who is still looking at Tommy's eyes, and taking his pulse again.

"Hesam," Peter says, his voice low. "I think he's got a concussion."

I make myself take him seriously. "OK, what have you got?"

"Unequal reaction to light. And this." He looks at me as he squats down with Tommy again, and right on cue, Tommy looks at him, then up at me, and asks, "Where's Jerry?"

Damn.

Tunnel vision. The bane of every EMT's existence. Frequent flyer, alcohol on his breath, what more do you need?

A pair of fresh eyes, that's what.

Sure enough, as Peter examines Tommy's head, he quickly finds a lump the size of a plum raised on the side of his head. It's even been bleeding, but I didn't see that, thinking his hair was just matted, as usual.

As we load him and take him to the hospital, Peter never gloats once, which, for some reason, only makes it worse.

.

* * *

I actually wrote this one _before _the first chapter I posted, so no, this doesn't push _Trauma _any further from my to do list. ;)


	3. Zombies, May 2007

**Zombies**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 19 May, 2007, 2:16 PM

I have this extremely weird recurring dream. I walk into the ADRC with a drunk staggering along between my partner and me, and while we get him checked in, I suddenly look around as all the semi-passed out drunks and drug users in the room raise their heads with blind eyes, starting to sway towards us, arms outstretched. I yell at my partner, and see the drunk we've just brought in is standing over him, his blank eyes staring at me as he turns.

I can deal with a lot of things, and I do deal with a lot of things. But every paramedic has things that freak him out. Wrecking your own brain through alcohol and drugs is mine. I don't mind nursing homes. I can have a lot of fun goofing around with slightly addled eighty-year-old ladies in the back of an ambulance. (Slightly addled eighty-year-old ladies are among the nicest people in the world.) But seeing an otherwise healthy person in his twenties ruining his life through alcohol and drugs just gets me. It's why I prefer day shifts by a long shot.

We're working another night shift, and are called for a man collapsed at four-thirty in the morning. Peter acknowledges the call, and we roll out. We're on scene three minutes later.

The man is lying on the ground, in a puddle of a wide variety of things I'm not going into, completely unresponsive. Peter checks his pupils.

"Pinpoint?" I ask.

"Pinpoint," he says.

I'm waiting for what he's going to do. I'm not precepting him, so I don't have to evaluate him, but I still want to know what procedures he'll choose, to give him a chance of doing his own assessments.

He rubs his knuckles over the man's sternum, which doesn't wake him up, so I scratch ammonia inhalants off my mental list. I take his pulse, while Peter checks his breathing.

"Pulse of forty-five," I say.

He nods. "He's got a respiratory rate of six. It's an overdose."

I agree with him. A lot of new paramedics call any dose an overdose, but six breaths per minute is definitely not enough.

"You want Narcan?" I ask.

He nods. "Shall I get the line?"

It's a bit like the quarterback asking the linebacker whether he should go for a touchdown, but I tell myself he's not trying to put me down. "Go for it," I say, getting the ambu-bag ready to ventilate the guy.

It takes Peter several minutes to find a vein this time (and I try not to feel too good about this). Still, he stays calm and focused, aware that this won't be an easy line to get, but also aware I'm pumping oxygen into the man's lungs so he won't go out on us right away.

He's about to try the extrajugular – the vein that runs along the side of the neck – when I do step in. "Try the arm or hand first," I tell him. "They often rip out the EJs when they come to. Very messy stuff."

He grimaces, and nods. He finally finds a vein in the hand, and inserts a twenty gauge.

"Have you ever seen Narcan in action?" I ask him.

"Yeah, when I was a hospice nurse, there was a patient who'd been given an overdose of opiates by accident."

"How would you handle this?"

"I'd start with one milligram, slow IV push."

"Slow sounds good. One milligram sounds bad."

"More?" he asks sceptically.

"Less," I say. It does feel good to know more than he does for once. "Unless you're keen on getting puked on."

"0.4 then?" he asks, and prepares the injection as I agree.

Peter pushes the Narcan, and I get the stretcher. When I'm back, the man is still on the ground, still out of it, but breathing okay at a RR of nine. No puke.

"Nice job," I say. "Let's get him to the hospital."

"So we're not supposed to wake them up," Peter says.

"No. This way is kinder. On all involved."

He nods. "Good to know," he says, and it feels good to know, too, that I've succeeded in teaching him something.

* * *

Some time later, we're already eyeing the digital clock in the ambulance. It's half an hour to our end of shift. And naturally, at twelve minutes to eight, two minutes before we would have dared to ask permission to head in, our number is called. "Two Victor, to East 23rd for a man not breathing."

Peter hits the lights and sirens as I hit the accelerator, and we're out. The address is a pretty apartment in Stuyvesant Town, prettier than the ones we usually go to, with a working elevator and people who are leaving the house for work. We get a lot of startled and concerned looks as we park on the curb, grab the stretcher, monitor, drug box, and in-house bag and hurry inside.

A young girl, not quite twenty, opens the door. Her eyes are frightened, and she has been crying. Peter and I exchange a glance as we hear someone shrieking inside the apartment.

"Where is he?" I ask.

"This way," she sobs, and shows us into a bedroom covered with Billy Talent posters and football paraphernalia.

Another kid around the same age sits in a corner, looking at us with a horrified stare. His eyes are bloodshot. A third kid lies outstretched on his back on the bed, vomit pooling around his head. The smell of vomit and booze in the room hits me like a mallet. The screaming, it quickly turns out, comes from the TV screen by the wall.

Someone has tried to wipe the puke from the boy's face with a corner of the blanket, but they'd have been better off turning him on his side. I can't find a pulse. Peter gets to the boy's head and curses as he knocks over several bottles with his foot, some of them still half-full. Peter bags the patient, but isn't getting much air in. The portable suction unit, of course, is down in the car, and there's no time to get it.

"Put him on the monitor," I tell Peter. "I'll get the tube."

The other two kids huddle at the wall as they're watching us. The patient's face is blue. Peter tries to get a history from the kids, but other than an intoxicated DVD night, which we could have guessed ourselves, we can't get much out of them. There's no adult in the house.

I go in with the laryngoscope, knowing I have no time to botch this. I haven't missed a tube in a long time, but I can hardly see the cords. I go in blind.

"Bag carefully," I say when I'm done.

Peter does, and I'm relieved to find that the lung sounds are equal. I'm in.

The monitor shows an agonal rhythm, which is not picking up with us bagging him. He's been without oxygen for too long.

"Get those kids out of here," I tell Peter under my breath. "And find a way to switch that damn TV off!"

Peter sends the boy and the girl out of the room. If it had been me, I would have found the time for one of my famous thirty second lectures on drug abuse, but he manages to be compassionate about it. Before he finally turns off the TV, I have gathered that they were watching "Shaun of the Dead."

The boy is in v-fib by now, and I take over bagging as Peter shocks him.

We work him for five minutes, by which time he's asystole, and decide to load and run. Peter does compressions while I bag and pull the stretcher, past the two kids in the hall. The girl is crying hysterically. The boy is just staring, his eyes glassy. He probably thinks he's still watching a zombie movie. Which, I guess, he is.

In the elevator, Peter slams epi and atropine through the line, we get a rhythm back twice, but never any pulses.

At the hospital, they work him for another forty-five minutes, then call him.

Eighteen years old. Killed by vodka and lemon.

Another zombie to dream of.


	4. Designated driver, May 2007

**Designated driver**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 25 May, 2007, 9:16 AM

There's a saying that nicely sums up driving in this city. It goes, "If you're going to drive in New York City – don't."

The good news is that this piece of advice works surprisingly well. You can go almost anywhere by subway if you want to avoid traffic altogether. If you have the extra bucks, you can take a taxi. If you're feeling just slightly foolhardy, you can go by bike. And in Manhattan, for a lot of distances and in a lot of neighbourhoods, you can just walk.

The bad news is that when you're in cardiac arrest, most of the above are not an option.

If you're going to drive an ambulance in New York City, you have to be as ruthless as a cabbie, and at the same time, be as civil about it as a small-town vicar if you're still keen on your end-of-year driving bonus.

I've been driving an ambulance in this city for seven years. I do it automatically, like a racer game on autopilot, and I manage to pick up my driving bonus most years. I think I missed two, but that's a pretty good record in this city.

Ambulances are respected here even less than they are in the rest of the country. If you want anyone to stop or make way for you, go lights and sirens. Lights only are completely ignored, by cabbies as well as by grandmas crossing the road in front of you. And even going on a one, with lights and sirens, you still have to be wary of those cabbies and grannies (although with the latter, I strongly suppose it has to do with lack of hearing rather than lack of manners).

Peter can drive, or else he wouldn't be a paramedic, but so far, he's been letting me do the driving on most occasions. I can tell he's not keen on it, and I don't mind it, so that works pretty well. During the rush hours, I've done all of the driving so far. Going lights and sirens during the rush hour in Manhattan has been known to get a paramedic's blood pressure to closely match that of the patient in myocardial infarction in the back of his ambulance.

When I was still riding with Jerry DuPont, we once bet each other on who could keep calmest going lights and sirens through a gridlocked street at five pm, and each did one of those runs over a week, taking our blood pressures afterwards. Jerry's was 170 over 130. Mine was 130 over 85.

We respond to a nursing home in downtown Manhattan for difficulty breathing. It is for an eighty-five year old woman with asthma, who responds to the albuterol treatment we give her, but her breathing still worries us enough to take her with us. It's a quarter to five in the afternoon, so I drive, while Peter stays in back and puts her on oxygen. We go on an easy two, which means lights but no sirens, which, in turn, means we could just as well leave off the lights altogether.

After two minutes, our patient has another asthma attack. Peter tries to calm her down and ventilate her, but soon informs me that she needs an airway. He still sounds reasonably calm, so I tell him to go for the tube. Technically, as a paramedic student, he's only allowed to intubate under supervision, but I know he's passed a successful tube or two in the ED. And I tell myself I'm supervising him right here.

From what little I can see of him in the rearview mirror, I can tell that this time, it's not going well.

"How's it going back there?" I ask.

"Her cords are clenched," he says, his voice sounding as if his were, too. "I can't get the tube in."

"Blood oxygen?"

"Ninety-two."

I let him try for another minute, then I leave the truck standing in the middle of the street – after hitting the sirens – and run around to the side door. "Trade places," I tell him, jerking my thumb back over my shoulder where the sirens are being joined by a cacophony of air horns, and climb in.

Peter gives a tight nod and jumps out, hardly looking at me as he gets around the truck and climbs into the driver's seat.

The woman's heart sounds are failing, her blood oxygen dropping beneath 90 per cent. I go in to intubate, but can't pass the tube straight away either. I pull out again and bag her, then try again. She needs the oxygen right now.

I manage to get the tube in on my second attempt, verify the position in the trachea, and as the woman's vital signs are picking up, I look up out of the small side window. We were three minutes out from the hospital when I got in here. Well, six during the rush hour.

We're ten yards from where we traded places.

Peter isn't honking the air horn. He isn't even swearing. He's just staring at the traffic in front of him, trying to go for the three-inch gaps the other cars are generously leaving, but more often then not, hesitates for a moment too long, so someone else goes for it. We're inching forward more than anything else. Peter definitely has more of the small-town vicar than he does of the NYC cabbie.

For a moment, I consider offering to switch again, but decide not to unless our patient's condition worsens. To be fair, I'm not sure I'd have been that much further by now. From what I can see, the streets are gridlocked, and it's hard to get through that.

Luckily for our patient, but unlucky for Peter, the woman remains stable, and he's left with another fifteen minutes of inching the four blocks to the hospital.

When we unload our patient, I have to bite my tongue to keep from laughing, knowing he would never forgive me if I did. He looks like he's just run a marathon.

I go restock while he writes up the run report. I spare him the humiliation of getting our run times, so I call dispatch, too. When we get back to the car, he hangs back and I just wordlessly walk around to get into the driver's seat.

"Hey," I say as we clear ourselves and are ready to head out. "It's not the end of the world to miss a tube. I missed two tubes when I was precepted, to much worse effects. We still got the job done."

He nods, grateful that I picked out the tube to build him up, and not his driving.

But I'm pretty sure he knows it was all strategy.


	5. Win, lose, June 2007

**Win/lose**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 13 June, 2007, 10:36 PM

Pretty much every paramedic I've ever met has chosen that profession because they want to save lives. And every paramedic has to accept, sooner or later, that they can't save every life. Sometimes you do a call where everything works just right, where you save someone's life and you'll walk an inch taller for the rest of the shift. Sometimes a wrong decision can mean the death of someone who, under minimally different circumstances, might still be alive. And sometimes, though you give a patient your best care and then some, it's not enough.

We're called for an unknown in Central Park. En route, dispatch gives us an update: It's an anaphylactic reaction, probably stung by a bee. It's the first call of the day, and there are comparatively few people around. There's a thirty-year-old man on the ground, two or three passers-by are gathered around him, but don't really know what to do. The man's face looks a mess, his eyes are swollen shut, and there is almost no lung activity by the time we arrive. Peter gets out the epi while I make an airway for the man. I can barely get the laryngoscope in; his tongue is as thick as a large tomato. Before I'm done, Peter injects the epinephrine IM, intramuscularly. The swelling is already reduced by the time we've loaded the man onto our stretcher, and as we wheel him into the ambulance, he comes to and rips out the tube before I can stop him. It doesn't matter; he's breathing fine. At Saint Vincent's, they put him in the waiting room but he'll walk out by noon. Our scene times are exceptional. Time for some back-slapping.

We've barely cleared from the hospital when we get another call: Cardiac arrest on 77th. On the way there, lights and sirens, dispatch gives us another update – it's just a presumption, they say. Go on an easy three. We switch off the lights and sirens and slow it down.

Paramedics can't pronounce death, they can only presume. In paramedic classes, there's usually a lot of fun made of the paramedic arriving on scene to find a decapitated guy and presume that he must in all likelihood have died, but only doctors can properly pronounce someone dead. Usually, if someone calls 911, it means we'll try everything to save a life.

We enter a pretty, well-kept apartment. A cop lets us in; another cop sits with an old man at a table in the living-room. The man is crying; the cop leads us to the bedroom.

The woman is old, frail. Her arms are so thin I could put my hand around her upper arm. She's on her back, her eyes closed, looking as if she were asleep, just her face is bluish, and her limbs are already stiff, meaning she must have been dead for hours. Lividity and rigor mortis – two of the few circumstances, short of severed heads, that allow us to presume someone dead, and not start any resuscitation attempts.

Peter puts her on the monitor, which shows asytole in all leads. I run a six-inch strip to document her passing, and Peter goes over to the living-room to get the patient's data.

When I come after him, I find him sitting at the table, filling out the form with the husband's help. The old man has several photos on the table, showing a lot of smiling faces.

"Do your children still live in New York?" Peter asks.

The man nods. "Two of the boys. Nine grandchildren." He smiles amid tears as he shows us a picture of a handsome black man holding two little girls with pigtails.

"Is that the two of you?" Peter asks quietly, looking at a wedding photograph, yellowed with age. It shows a happy, handsome couple. The woman looks like Halle Berry, beaming at the camera.

The old man sniffs and nods. "She played Beneatha Younger in _A Raisin in the Sun_ on Broadway, forty years ago," he says. "She was only understudy, and it was just for three shows, but she was a star. Everyone else was really beneath her."

"I bet she was wonderful," Peter says.

"Yes," the husband agrees. "She was."

* * *

Later in the afternoon, our number is called as the second ambulance on scene for a motor vehicle accident (MVA). We've heard it over the radio – it's a bad one, the kind of call you dread and wish for at the same time. Dread because trauma calls are never easy. As opposed to most other calls we do, trauma usually means an otherwise healthy person suddenly pulled out of life as they knew it in a manner of seconds. Wish for because it's the call that lets you prove yourself, because you do what you really want to do – save lives.

When we arrive, the cops and the FDNY are already on scene, as well as unit 833, a basic unit. They've got a motorcyclist boarded and collared, but the man needs an airway, which they can't do. While I prepare to intubate, I look around for Peter to get a line. Peter is across the street, where a convertible has crashed headlong into a wall. The firefighters are working on the wreck, and just by looking at Peter, I can tell he wants to rip the flame cutter out of their hands and have a go at it himself.

I tell him to leave it and help me here, and for a moment, he looks mutinous, but then he complies. Still, as he goes for the line, he goes right through the vein. I feel bad for him, but tell him just to try the other arm.

He gets the IV on his second attempt, and I help the two EMTs to load the patient so they can take him to the hospital. Peter is already hovering right behind the firemen again, to get to the other man in the car as soon as possible.

It takes another fifteen minutes before they have finally extricated the man. I know it's no use after one look at the guy. He has a head injury that is incompatible with life, and is already turning purple.

Peter has to see all these, but refuses to accept it. He starts CPR as I put the man on the monitor. As with the old woman earlier, asystole in all leads. He's dead.

I should have stopped Peter there and then. Once we start CPR, we are not allowed to stop until a doctor presumes a patient dead. But the look on Peter's face tells me that I might be in for a fist fight if I tell him to stop resuscitation now. I pull out the ambu-bag and start ventilating the man, telling myself Peter needs to see for himself that there's nothing to be done. That, and the fact that I value the shape of my nose.

After a minute, I realise that Peter isn't seeing anything. All he sees is a guy around thirty who is way too young to die, and he seems to think he's the one to pull him back.

I try to make him snap out of it, but I have to physically shake him before he finally stops. He's got the expression of a madman as he looks up at me, as if he's accusing me I was the one who let his patient die. I've seen a lot of helper's syndrome in new paramedics. I've never seen one utterly and completely refusing to accept the obvious.

The moment passes, and he looks down at the dead man. "Dammit," he whispers. "I could have saved him."

"No, you couldn't," I reason. "He bled out in the car."

"Should have got to him faster," he says, still not budging.

"He was pinned in there!" I say.

He finally looks at me. "So I should have been stronger," he says, determined to blame himself.

"You can't save everyone." Stating the obvious. But he behaves as if this is news to him. He doesn't answer.

Finally, he turns and walks back to the truck, muttering, "Should have been stronger."

I call Medical Control to ask permission to presume before I join him.

.

.

.

* * *

Some changes to my fic "Unsung Heroes", and some dialogue that simply needed to be redone. The episode has given me some major headaches. Pretty much everything Hesam and Peter did in that crash scene was plain atrocious, mostly Hesam simply telling Peter to stop CPR. That would have cost a real paramedic his licence. I tried to write around that as well as I could, and added a monitor, at least.


	6. The art of being sick, June 2007

**The art of being sick when you're in EMS**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 14 June, 2007, 8:52 PM

I arrive at work at five minutes to seven, and go directly to the ambulance bay. Since Peter has the shorter way to work but prefers not to drive, while I don't mind driving but have to come in from Brooklyn every day, we've struck a deal that he does the checkup in the morning, and I do the rush-hour driving, which works well for all concerned.

Our truck is already in the garage – not a given – and I walk around, expecting to see Peter through the open back door, halfway through the checkup.

The doors are closed, and Peter isn't there.

Puzzled, I walk to the supervisor's office and get the keys and radios. I don't ask whether they've seen Peter yet. He's obviously the one stuck in the NYC traffic today, and he'll probably show up within the next few minutes. No need to alarm the supervisor.

I do a very quick checkup, but it's still ten past when I've finished. Still no Peter.

I wait for another five minutes but then decide I can't cover for him anymore. They expect me to clear at seven. And I can't without a partner.

I brace myself and go into Supervisor Jackson's office again. He's going to love this. I can see his danger senses are tingling as he sees me coming in again. "What is it?" he asks, suspicious.

I try to sound neutral. "Is Peter in yet?"

Jackson's eyes narrow. "What do you mean, is he in yet? He isn't?"

"He hasn't called?" I feign nonchalance, when all I want to do right now is to get a message to Peter to pack his things and emigrate to some far-off place where Jackson's wrath can't reach him. The North Pole sounds like an option.

Jackson picks up – correction, _whips_ up – the phone, flips through his papers for Peter's number, and dials it, glaring at me since he has nobody else to glare at. The North Pole suddenly gains a lot of favourable sides.

Jackson glares at me for a long while, holding the phone to his ear. Then he hangs up – correction, _bangs_ up.

"His answering machine."

"You didn't leave a message?" I say, as stupidly as unnecessarily.

He gives a snort as he precedes me from the office, storming into the adjacent EMT room, sending a few paper cuttings on the walls flying in his wake. Tammy Young and Shannon Kemper are there, waiting for 421 to come in from their shift so they can take over. I've already heard 421 are doing an MVA and are due in late.

"I need a replacement for Petrelli. Tammy, can you cover? Shannon, I'll get you a replacement as soon as possible. If all else fails I'll get one of the night crew to stay around."

"Sure," Tammy says. I've worked with her once or twice. And I'm sort of glad I get to work with her and not with Nick Greentree of 421, whose mood is going to hit rock bottom if he learns he has to stick around after coming off the night shift.

Still, I'm not convinced it will be necessary. "Peter'll probably be here in a minute," I try to calm Jackson down. "If he's not at home, he must be on his way here." Still, I tell myself, he would have called once he realised he wouldn't make it. This definitely doesn't sound like him.

Jackson doesn't grace my protestation with an answer, and storms back into his office, where I see him take out his anger on the duty roster. Tammy Young and I exchange a glance.

"Boy, he's pissed," she remarks.

"Yep," I say. "And somehow you're never quite sure it's not you he's pissed at."

We get into 059 and clear, at half past seven. For two hours, we are too busy to pay much thought to anything but the job, until we come into Mercy Heights around a quarter to ten with a patient. While Tammy goes to restock, I take my paperwork to the EMT room where, sure enough, I run into a disgruntled-looking Nicholas Greentree, writing up a report as well.

"Still no word from Peter?" I ask him, startled.

"Not as much as a _mi dispiace_," Nicholas says, jamming his ballpoint pen into his sleeve pocket with such force it cracks the fabric. "And unless he's got a really good excuse for this, I'm gonna knock the stuffing out of his Italian ass. Whatever's left of it after Jackson's done with him, that is."

I frown. "This isn't like him at all. When's he ever been late? _Or_ sick?"

Being sick is a bit of a no-go in EMS. It's OK to be sick on your day off, but on a working day, it's just too much bother. You know the feeling of feeling very slightly crappy in the evening, then going to bed with a couple of aspirin, and then waking up at approximately 4.15, feeling very decidedly crappy, and know you have to be off to work in two hours? You consider calling in sick, and the mental image of all that follows is enough to make you decide you're not that sick after all. At work, you may then consider yourself lucky you only have a head cold and a mild temperature when confronted with all the other things you might have. And once in a while, you can derive an amazing amount of satisfaction by snapping at someone who called an ambulance for a runny nose: "Why don't you take a swig from my coffee cup, and you may get something a lot closer to pneumonia than whatever _you've_ got?"

This is what most EMTs' work ethos looks like. Peter is no exception. So, while I understand that Nick is mad at him, I don't think Peter is just taking a day off at our expense. I remember how devastated he was after that MVA call we did last afternoon, but I still can't believe Peter is just sticking his head in the sand now. It's just not like him.

Nick finally gets relieved by James McElroy, who has agreed to take over Peter's shift, but ends up with Shannon Kemper, as Tammy and I are working a cardiac arrest that keeps us occupied until 3 p. m. Every time we come into Mercy Heights – which is three times that day – Jackson looks more pissed, which I wouldn't have thought possible that morning. I learn, from others, that Jackson has tried to call Peter several times, even on his cell phone, but hasn't found out anything.

Peter doesn't come to work the next day either; neither does he call. I work with Karen O'Neill.

The next day is my day off. I walk by Peter's apartment and knock, but nobody opens. I hang around for a few minutes but can't hear anything; after a while, a woman comes up from the elevator with grocery bags. As she unlocks her door, which is next to Peter's, I ask her if she's seen him recently. She says she hasn't, but then adds she often doesn't see him for days or weeks at a time, and goes on telling me how she thought he had moved out last fall, until he came back around March.

I can't begin to understand what this all means.


	7. Slow shift, June 2007

**Slow shift**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 20 June, 2007, 10:37 PM

Peter still isn't back, nor does anyone know where he's gone to. As I'm without a permanent partner, I'm working with someone else every day; luckily, whoever I'm working with has had more of a chance to prepare for an extra shift than Nick did last week, so their mood is a lot more normal.

After nearly a week, people are growing concerned. It's as if Peter has dropped off the face of the earth. I've tried to call him a couple of times, but I always get his answering machine, or "participant not available" if I try his cell phone. After three days, I even try to call his mother but am almost relieved that nobody answers. I do stop this short of calling Homeland Security and asking his brother. A man's gotta have his principles.

I work with Tammy Young again on Monday, and we're stationed near Central Park West, one of the quieter shifts you can have in this city. Tammy has bought a newspaper, but unfortunately for me, she's not interested in the sports page, so I have to make do with the financial section while I wait until she's done with the Washington one. Jerry did have his merits. On the other hand, all Jerry ever wanted my opinion on was baseball games (Peter tried this too, once or twice, as he's a New York Mets fan, but he was a lot quicker than Jerry to pick up I'm not interested in baseball), and Tammy at least lets me share opinions on the front page.

"Did you see this?" she suddenly asks me and points at the front page, which is one of the reasons why I want to get my hands on that part. The headline reads _Terrorist Attack on Capitol Hill Thwarted_.

"Yeah, it was all over the news last night, wasn't it?" I say.

Tammy shakes her head. "They say it was most likely a lone gunman," she says. "Am I the only one who thought he totally looked like he was drunk? Or on drugs?"

"No, you're not," I say. "And I'm glad _I'm_ not the only one who does TV assessments."

She laughs. "All the time. I'm not allowed to watch _ER_ with my hubby anymore."

"Still, being on drugs doesn't account for how he got hold of a bomb. Maybe he was scared and had a couple of stiff shots before he went to Capitol Hill." I look over her shoulder at a slightly blurry photograph of the man. "He doesn't strike me as a terrorist."

She looks back and forth between the photo and me for a couple of times. "No, you're right, he doesn't."

I pretend to punch her in the shoulder, and we get a call to 91st/Madison for difficulty breathing.

It's an asthma call, but when we arrive, the man's family have already succeeded in getting him his inhaler. We do a checkup, but the man, who is around sixty-five, doesn't want to come with us. As we can't take him against his will, we have him sign a refusal form and are off again.

"His brother was there, you know?" I say as I pull out.

"What?"

"Sorry. The Capitol Hill thing. Peter's brother was there."

"Really?" Tammy digs out the newspaper from the glove compartment to look at the article again. "He's on TV a lot these days, isn't he?"

"He knocked the guy out, as far as I know," I say. "Whenever I see him on TV or in the paper, I want to shake it and ask him if he knows more than we do. He doesn't act like a guy whose brother's gone missing."

"He acts like a politician," she says.

"Yeah, I guess. Though he sure gets his hands dirty."

We're back near Central Park. It's one p. m., and I get us sandwiches. The day is slow; we get called for a sprained ankle at a basketball game a hundred yards away, but the guy, a gangly kid of about twenty, says he's fine and signs another refusal form. I'm writing up the paperwork on a bench in the sun when Tammy notices he and his friend have left their basketball. She challenges me to a couple of shots. It's a slaughter. I'm almost relieved when dispatch calls our number. I briefly consider asking for a revenge at soccer later, but I don't. To be beaten at basketball by a black girl is nothing to be ashamed of. To be beaten at soccer by a black girl is. And I sense there'd be another debacle coming.

We put the ball under the bench and go to 68th for an anaphylactic reaction. A young girl who is allergic to peanuts has had some peanut sauce at a restaurant. She's unresponsive as we arrive, her airway swollen shut. We give epinephrine on the spot, and Tammy drives while I stay in back with the hysterical mother, trying to intubate the girl. I haven't missed a tube in eighteen months, but I nearly do now while I try to blend out the mother nearly shaking me to implore me to help her daughter. At some point, I snap at her, "I'm trying to! Now if you'll just let me do my job, and you can go on shouting over there?"

That shuts her up, and I manage to pass the tube and save her daughter.

In triage, as I give a report to the nurse, I hear the mother complaining to Tammy that I was prejudiced against blacks. I hear Tammy making a few neutral noises, but she doesn't defend me either. I'm seriously pissed at the mother, but I swallow any further remark and go take back and remake the stretcher. It's always strange where you end up in the food chain depending on who you work with. When I work with Peter, I'm the Arab. When I'm with Tammy, I'm white. And in some cases, you're the bad guy no matter what.

It's late afternoon by now, and we're sitting in the ambulance again. Tammy suggests another basketball match, but I'm not in the mood for another defeat. I guess I am prejudiced after all.

She senses that I'm still angry, and gets out her newspaper again, this time giving me the Washington section. I accept the peace offer, and the newspaper.

I skim the Capitol Hill article again, then leaf through the rest. "Did you see this?" I ask Tammy after a few minutes as I get to page five. "That was the big news earlier yesterday afternoon."

She glances over to the headline I point to. It reads, _Prison transfer_ _in Violation of Civil Rights? – Homeland Security Denies Knowledge_.

"No?" she says. "What's it about?"

"The media apparently were given some video footage of American citizens being carted off on a plane in hoods and restraints," I say. "Though I have no idea how they were able to tell they're American citizens."

She looks at the photograph accompanying the article, which shows a lot of people in a hangar, all handcuffed and in coveralls and black hoods. "Sounds like a hoax," she says.

I shrug. "They examined the vid, and said it was genuine," I say. "Although I suppose they could all be hiding beards and turbans under those hoods."

Tammy laughs. "No way," she says. "If they were, Homeland Security would have carted them off openly and released the vid themselves."

I have to agree.

Five minutes later, we get a call to a minor MVA on 88th/Madison, and a block away, I look up at a tall, handsome house on the corner.

"Peter grew up in that one, did you know?" I say.

She leans forward to look out of my side window. "Wow," she says, impressed. "What a palace. It's one thing to know his brother is a senator, but… wow." She leans back to look at me. "You're worried, huh?"

"A bit." I keep telling myself that if anything bad had happened, someone would have told us, but this lack of any news bothers me.

"You know," she says in an ostentatious attempt to cheer me up, "he was probably one of the people in those jumpsuits."

I frown at her until I realise she's talking about the newspaper article. I snort a dutiful laugh although I don't find it particularly funny.

She's whipped out the newspaper again and looks at the photograph. "No, seriously!" she says, pointing. "Look at that one here. The same bow-legs. And doesn't Peter have a watch like that?"

"A lot of people have watches like that. And bow legs."

She sighs resignedly, and puts away the paper as we pull up on scene.


	8. Don't try this at home kids, July 2007

**Don't try this at home, kids**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 5 July, 2007, 3:15 PM

No word from Peter. And to make matters worse, James McElroy is off sick with severe back pain and will be for another week. We're all working double shifts to compensate. Since the entire duty roster is jumbled up beyond recognition, there hasn't been an attempt to team me up with anyone even halfway permanently. When Doug is back, Jackson says. He's doing quite a number of shifts himself these days. Nobody uses the words "when Peter is back" anymore. After three weeks and no news from him, it's plain he's not coming back.

On July 4 I'm working with Hannah Davies. It's a hot day, and we don't have much time to talk between calls, which is just as well, as Hannah is a rather grumpy type, and if she gets into talking, it's mostly gossip, which I'm not into.

We run two calls for unresponsives in nursing homes before mid-day, as the heat claims its victims. Both of them are basic calls; no cardiac arrests. One takes us over to Brooklyn. While I write my run form in the EMT room of Coney Island Hospital, another EMT sits across from me, looking decidedly green in the face.

"You OK?" I ask him.

"Yeah," he says in a far-off voice. "I've just seen the most disgusting thing I've ever seen."

I think of severed limbs, dashed-out brains or bloated corpses fished out of the East River, but since he seems to expect me to, I ask him what it was.

"Hot-dog eating championship," he replies.

"You a vegetarian?" I ask, sympathetic.

"I am now."

The first burn victim of the day is a three-year-old kid who crashed into daddy's barbecue grill and spilled hot coals over her right arm and left hand. Her mortified parents and several other little kids are yelling and running all over the place as Hannah and I try to restore some kind of order, and finally get the girl's aunt to go inside with the other children.

We scoop up the girl and get her into our rig, to take her to the Presbyterian Burn Center. The burns on her left hand are severe enough that she needs expert care to restore full mobility in that hand. While she isn't in mortal danger and was lucky that she got none if it in her face, she's crying hysterically until the 3 milligrams of morphine I give her calm her down. I find myself wishing I could just give some to the mother as well, who continues sobbing hysterically on the way to the hospital.

When we've left them in triage, Hannah goes on and on about how some people shouldn't be allowed to have kids at all. While I agree that a lot of accidents are really just carelessness, in this case, I guess it could have happened to anyone. There were three families at the barbecue party, seven kids between two and nine running around. You can't put them all on a leash.

We do one more minor burn injury about 5 p. m., then some more basic calls and a violent psych transfer at 9, which puts a sudden stop to our vague hopes of watching the fireworks. We end up driving through streets full of people _ooohing_ and _aaaahing_ at no doubt dazzling displays of pyrotechnics overhead, while trying to restrain and eventually sedate a seventy-year-old man who's dead sure he's in the Mekong Delta. To be honest, I can't fault him. I wish the noise would stop. I just wonder why they couldn't have kept him in his nursing home for the night, and strongly suspect they just wanted him off their hands. Well, enter the ambulance drivers.

When I've finally succeeded in sedating our patient I'm drenched in sweat, and find myself thinking about the irony of a Vietnam veteran freaking out during the Independence Day fireworks. It's almost Hollywood material, if it wasn't so damn anticlimactic.

We clear from the call at a quarter past ten, by which time the Macy's Fireworks are over. Private fireworks, however, continue all through the night. The EMS channel is abuzz with calls. Our next one is even more Hollywood material than the last. At the very least, it's dumbamerica-dot-org material.

We're called to a rather intoxicated party in Greenwich Village. Recently, it's become bloody as well as intoxicated. Dispatch sent us there as the second ambulance on scene, with notes of several injured individuals.

Sure enough, a crew of FDNY EMTs are taking care of a young man with bloody cuts all over his upper body. Two of his fingers are missing. There are other people with cuts, so the first thing that enters my mind is a stabbing, but the atmosphere doesn't look hostile enough for that, and they haven't sent any cops. I join the EMT crew; the man is bleeding badly, and they need me to get a line. One of the EMTs then goes off to look after a woman of about twenty with a bad gash across her shoulder, while Hannah goes off in search of the first man's fingers. She actually finds one of them; the other will forever remain missing.

We finally figure out what happened. The guy we're treating – all through the next week, he'll be called "Frodo of the Eight and a Half Fingers" in EMT lounges all over Manhattan – thought it would be a very funny idea to make a firecracker go off in a beer bottle. The first bottle he tried was still half full, so naturally, the firecracker didn't go off. The man then decided to ignore the warning that fate had generously sent him, and tried an empty beer bottle. Unluckily for him, it was pretty hard to get the firecracker through the bottleneck. He was just done with it when the thing went off.

I later learn that the doctors manage to sew the one finger Hannah found back to his hand. The one they didn't find was his middle finger.

I like to think that fate has kept it as a souvenir.


	9. Downstairs, July 2007

**Downstairs**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 18 July, 2007, 1:44 PM

Working too many shifts to blog much. Still doing a lot of overtime and extra shifts. My (non-existent) retirement programme rejoices, while my back does not.

Sometimes I feel like Manhattan doesn't have any ground levels at all. I tell myself that, logically, there must be a ground floor on every house. But somehow, we never go to one. Maybe it's like the thirteenth floors of a building; they just leave them out and start at two.

It's usually fifteenth floor and up for us. And too much of the time it's the ones with the "out of order" signs on the elevators.

I'm working with Bernard Adams, who has been a paramedic in this city for over fifteen years, though he isn't much older than me. He's six-two, and probably weighs around 200 pounds, and is a great guy to have around on fourteenth floors.

We're called to an apartment on the – you guessed it – fourteenth floor for an unknown. It's a run-down housing complex I've been in several times before. We don't know what to expect, so we take all our equipment – in-house bag, monitor, biotech, oxygen supplies, along with the stair chair.

We reach the apartment with the right number. The door is closed. Bernard tries the bell, but we don't hear anything, so I knock.

A boy of around five opens us. He is wearing a hand-me-down Hello Kitty tee that's dirty as well as several numbers too big for him. He just stands there looking at us.

"Did anyone here call for an ambulance?" I ask.

He keeps staring at us, then looks back over his shoulder.

Bernard pushes past the boy with the stair chair, and I come after him with the rest of our equipment.

The living-room – at least I suppose it's the living-room – looks a mess. Two more children, smaller than the boy who opened, are sitting on the floor half-dressed, looking at us as we enter. An older girl, around eight by her size but with the eyes of someone who has seen far too much in her life, is sitting by the sofa, where a large woman of around twenty-two lies.

"My Mama don't wake up," the girl says.

Bernard checks for a pulse and does a quick assessment while I try to get a history from the kids.

"We're trying to help your Mama, OK?" I say. "When was she last awake?"

"She done sleep here on the couch. I make her breakfast, but she don't wake up."

I nod, trying to reassure the girl, and wishing there was any way I could avoid the next question. "Did she do drugs?" I ask.

The two older children just look at me, and don't answer.

"Does she have any illnesses? Any medicine she has to take regularly?"

Both are staring at me and make no reply.

The mother's eyes hold the answer. The pupils are dilated, and she's tachycardic, has a fast heart rate as Bernard puts her on the monitor. I've been in this house for crack before.

"We have to take your Mama to the hospital," I tell the girl. "She's very sick, but she won't die, OK? Do you have any neighbours here, or family, or friends, any grown-ups who can look after you?"

She looks at me blankly.

"What about your neighbours?" I try again. "Anyone who can come over and look after you?"

"I look after them," she finally says, her quick gaze around the room indicating the younger children.

I realise she probably takes care of her younger siblings a lot better than their crack-addicted mother, but still make a mental note of giving their number to the Child Protective Services. Not that it'll be big news to them, or that there's much of a chance that, in ten years' time, it won't be the girl, or her brother, sprawling across the sofa after a cocaine overdose. I'd wish to God that this girl's spirit will remain as strong as it is now when she is older, if I believed God existed.

Bernard and I put the mother on the stair chair to get her out. For an unresponsive patient, the stretcher should be the first option, but on the fourteenth floor and with those charming cardboard "out of order" signs on the elevator doors, the stretcher rules itself out.

Being much taller, Bernard takes the bottom, which I'm grateful for. It still isn't much fun. By the fifth set of stairs, I can't believe there's nine more. _Nine. More_.

We're sweating and cursing by the time we reach the last set of stairs. I don't know which of us, in our desire to be out of here, moves too fast, but suddenly I hear Bernard yell in pain, and the chair lurches forward.

I manage to hold on to it and knock it into the wall next to me, to block its way down. I'm holding on alone. Bernard is a few steps further down, also leaning against the wall, holding his ankle, grunting with pain.

I manage to balance the chair so it won't go tumbling down, and pant, "You OK?"

"Yeah," he grinds out, and limps back to take the bottom end again.

"You wanna trade places?" I ask him.

"I got it," he says. "Let's move it!"

We manage to carry the woman in the chair down the last few steps, and when the chair is safely on solid ground, I look at Bernard. His face is contorted with pain, and he's drenched in sweat, as am I, but I can see that he doesn't want me to have a look at his foot just now. So I wheel the chair to our rig alone while he hauls the equipment, and helps me lift the woman on the stretcher and strap her in.

I make a move towards his foot, but he shakes his head. "I'm fine."

"Can you tech?" I ask him. There's no way I'm letting him drive with his foot, so staying in back with the patient, who looks stable enough, seems the smartest choice.

"Yeah, sure thing."

As I get out, I see him sit on the bench and lay out his IV equipment, and decide I can let him do this.

We arrive at the hospital twelve minutes later. When I open the back door, he has gotten an IV in and put her on the non-rebreather.

"Oh, fuck," I say at the sight of his ankle, which is the size of a small melon.

He actually tries to get up, but the foot won't support his weight.

"You sit there," I tell him in a no-nonsense voice I hope he'll listen to. "I'll get help."

I flag down a basic crew restocking their truck after a call. One of them helps me wheel in the woman, the other puts Bernard in a wheelchair and gets him into the ED. We make an odd little procession.

The triage nurse looks perplexed. "What have you got, cocaine intoxication?" she asks, with a look at what I'm bringing her.

"Yeah," I say. "Plus this one happened on the way. Two for the price of one." I indicate Bernard. His middle finger gives me a piece of his mind.

I ask permission to get back to base, wish Bernard good luck, and change my soaking wet shirt. Supervisor Jackson's expression at hearing Bernard is out of it with a broken ankle is one of utter defeat. He wipes the name "Adams" from the whiteboard in an almost ceremonial way. I feel sorry for him.

I settle by the TV in the EMT room while I wait for Jackson to assign me another partner until the end of my shift, and enjoy the luxury of a cup of coffee. Cold drinks would just have made my day, but the soda machine is out of order.

Nick Greentree comes in with some paperwork after a while, and we make some idle conversation while we watch a news programme with half an eye.

"You and your news," he says. "Where's the remote?"

"Gah," I say with a look at the TV. "Not him again. Go ahead, change the channel."

Nick looks up to see the face of Nathan Petrelli on the screen. It's a repeat of an interview of a couple days previously, and while I was never a fan of Senator Petrelli, he gave me the creeps in that one. He looked sinister. You know the Simpsons episode where Mayor Quimby gives a speech surrounded by hellfire and with little devil horns formed by his mussed hair? Those flames would have made a nice effect here.

"… when he agrees to shake my hand, true change will come to this country."

"He gives me the willies," I say as Nathan Petrelli is replaced by Shakira shaking her booty at Nick and myself.

"_She_ does," Nick grumbles, continues zapping through the channels and finally gives up, going back to Shakira.

I bear with her until Nick gathers his run reports and leaves, and switch back to CNN.

An hour later, Simon Blumenthal arrives to work with me on the rest of the shift.

It's just two hours left, during which we run one basic call, and ask permission to head in at eight minutes to seven. We're given permission, but not by Jackson, but by Karen O'Neill. When we return to the hospital, we learn there was a bad MVA with several critically injured on 44th, and that Jackson is on scene in the fly car.

I go in to hand back the portable radios and ambulance keys, and my eyes nearly fall out of their sockets when I look at the duty roster, to see whether Jackson (or Karen) have already managed to get a replacement for Bernard for our Wednesday shift.

There's a name next to mine all right. It reads, _Petrelli_.

I look around at Hannah Davies, who is outside with a run report. "You see that?" I ask her, stunned.

She looks at the whiteboard and goggles, then she gives a fractious sort of _humph_.

"What'ya expect?" she says testily. "Must be great, having a senator for a brother."

I frown as I stare at Peter's name on the whiteboard. He's the last kind of guy I'd expect to rely on his senator brother to cover up his stunts. Much less since the last thing he told me about Senator Nathan Petrelli was that they weren't talking.

I don't say anything. Wednesday should be interesting.


	10. Puke sense, July 2007

**Puke sense**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 19 July, 2007, 3:16 PM

On Monday, I hung around with Karen at the hospital until Jackson got back from his call, because I was damned if I didn't want to know what the hell was going on. Jackson's behaviour was the strangest of all. I had seen him all but foaming at the mouth on the day Peter didn't show up for his shift; now, he said with a matter-of-course attitude that Peter had been sick with mononucleosis, as if this was something we all should have known for weeks.

This isn't Jackson, I know it. My money is on brain-wash. Or maybe alien abduction.

On Wednesday morning, I enter the ambulance bay to the familiar sight of Peter Petrelli standing in the back of unit 059, checking our equipment. It strangely feels like a déja-vù. He greets me with a noncommittally friendly "How's it going?", as if the last time we met was just two days ago.

I reply with a cautious greeting and get a good look at Peter. He does look like he's been through the mill, but rather literally.

He catches me staring at the diagonal gashes on his cheek. There's another on his forehead. They look just a couple of days old. He seems startled, as if he'd already forgotten about them, and I can see he's groping for an explanation.

"Mononucleosis, huh?" I say. "Looks like you were in one of those hospitals that discharge you with a punch in the face. I've read about those. Nasty stuff."

He gives a laugh that, you have to hand it to him, hardly sounds nervous, puts away his pen and tells me we're all stocked up and ready to hit the streets.

I let it go for the time being. I have a feeling that he doesn't want to talk about whatever happened, and we have a job to do.

The second call of the day is a patient transfer for an elderly lady with a brain tumour from her nursing home to a hospital for surgery.

As with many nursing home patients, even the more critical ones, she is just on oxygen by a nasal cannula, so Peter bends over her to put an oxygen mask over her face in the rig while I get a line. She can't speak, and has been mildly sedated, but she is scared and agitated. He does his best to calm her. Peter's best to calm anyone is usually pretty good, but today, it doesn't do the trick. Maybe I wouldn't be too calm either if the guy taking me from my nursing home looked as if he'd recently played porcupine polo.

Now I ask you, what's the most valued skill of an EMT? Medical knowledge, you say. That's a start. Most EMTs come with it (though not enough of them) and it does help a lot. Peter comes with a lot of it, and is gathering more with each call.

Compassion? Definitely. It tends to use itself up to some degree after a few years, even months, in the city. Still, I don't see Peter running out of that anytime soon. He makes a pretty damn good paramedic all right. But there's one thing he has less of than you need. And that's puke sense.

You get vomited on in this job. Some medics last longer than others. Peter caught his first puke on his first day. I do suppose it has to do with not wanting to alienate a patient by scrambling away from them as they start to heave, but most of us don't have such qualms if we don't have the emesis basin handy.

At least in this case, I have to say in his defence I didn't see it coming either.

I'd never have expected such a little old lady to pack such a punch. This is almost deserving of the term "projectile vomiting".

Peter barely flinches as he's hit, then he hardly misses a beat, changes the patient's breath mask, suctions her airway clear, and tries to clean himself as well as her with a towel while he tells her, "It's OK, don't worry about it. I'm gonna give you something for the nausea, OK? It'll be better in a minute."

He waits for me to tape down the IV and then injects her with 3 mg of Zofran. Looking at him, and at the stretcher, I find it hard to believe that she would have had any puke left in her, but I guess you can never be too sure.

I bite back any remark I might have made – and oh, there are so many – and decide I'll leave him, and the patient, their dignity, get around the truck and put myself behind the wheel.

We drop our patient off at the Bellevue, and for his troubles, Peter is rewarded with a faint smile from her as he pats her hand and wishes her good luck. He looks a mess. No matter if we wear our blue polos or white shirts, puke stands out. I wonder if there are any EMS companies in this country that use ochre-coloured uniforms.

I go restock while he writes the run report at the nurses' station, enduring their remarks with his lopsided grin. I guess it says something about your good looks if you're still being chatted up by nurses while you're covered in vomit.

"Nice strategy," I say when we head back to our truck.

He gives me another wry grin and looks down at himself. "Wait before you clear us, OK?"

"I wasn't going to clear us." I call Mercy Heights and get permission to head in and do some laundry.

"Thanks, man," he says, grateful.

I get us both a coke at the cafeteria and, on my return, find Peter in the EMT room next to his empty locker, looking embarrassed. "Seems someone cleared out my stuff while I was away," he says. "Got a spare shirt I can borrow?"

I find a blue polo in my locker and hand it to him. He has gotten rid of his and is examining the tee he's wearing under it, giving a sigh as he decides it's not salvageable either.

He stuffs his things in the laundry, and before he pulls his new shirt over his head, I find myself staring at a recently healed gunshot wound an inch below his collarbone. It looks three weeks old at most. I've seen enough GSWs in this job to know what I'm looking at. It looks pretty ugly, too, as if it wasn't treated in a hospital. I've seen that kind on numerous occasions as well. Usually, on gangbangers who didn't go to a hospital because they know they'll report gunshot wounds to the police.

But this is Peter we're talking about. Peter who has me drive back six blocks because a street vendor gave him two quarters too many as change.

OK, so it was two blocks, and it was five dollars. But, you know, he would.

He catches my stare and turns, pretending to be checking the washing machine as he tucks the shirt in, subtly making it clear it's another thing he doesn't want to talk about.

Mononucleosis my foot. What the hell has he been up to?

He avoids any questions by managing to be very busy for the rest of the shift. We work extra hours, and our last call has us working past ten PM. It's a tough call, two elderly people caught in a burning house. Neither makes it out alive. I put off any questions concerning him as we sit in the EMT room with a coffee afterwards, blearily staring into space. He leaves before I do.

I run into Jerry DuPont and Hannah Davis when I'm about to punch out. They look around, and when they see Peter's not there, Hannah asks, "So, where the hell was he?"

Wouldn't she love the gossip. Gashes across his face, shot in the chest. It would keep Mercy Heights in its entirety talking until Christmas. And get Peter discharged in a heartbeat, unless the entire hospital board has been abducted by aliens.

I shrug. I just want my bed.

"Off sick," I say. "Mononucleosis."

I can see their sceptical looks as they watch me get my bike from the shed and head home.


	11. Pride and prejudice, July 2007

**Pride and prejudice**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 21 July, 2007, 2:21 PM

I'm awakened at 5.50 a. m. by the dulcet tones of Timbaland on my radio alarm, which usually is one of my get-out-of-bed-right-now moments, but last night was late, so I just hit the snooze button before I have a chance to think this decision through.

I'm awakened again ten minutes later by the equally dulcet tones of the newscaster. Another hot day… memorial events in London two years after the Underground bombings… 23 South Korean church workers kidnapped by Taliban.

Great.

I hate the Taliban as much as the next person. I probably hate them more. One reason (probably not the main reason, but a very personal one) I hate them for is that people keep expecting me to apologize for actions committed by people operating from a trifling six hundred miles from where I was born. Do people in Death Valley keep having to apologize for Charles Manson?

Come to think of it, I guess they do.

My ten minutes of Timbaland-induced snoozing mean that I reach the ambulance bay at seven a. m. sharp, and I consider myself lucky that Peter, as always, is already there and has done the checkup.

"You OK?" he asks me as he notices my bad mood.

"Yeah. All stocked up?"

"All ready to clear," he says.

So here we are. He doesn't knock me about being chronically late for work, and I don't badger him about his long absence. I haven't decided yet if this is really that smart, but at least it's convenient. He's got my back, and I've got his – that's how it works.

We get a call for a seizure about ten minutes later, and dispatch tells us to take it at an easy two – lights but no sirens. When we're almost there, we get an update – step it up to a one, they say; paediatric, patient not breathing.

Peter hits the sirens, and although it's just a few blocks, we soon realize that we're not making much ground. The streets are already clogged up in the morning rush hour.

"Listen," Peter says after a minute. "It's just two blocks. I'll jump out and see what I can do. It's a kid. If we need to get out quickly, I'll just grab 'em and get back to you. Way better than have them wait another fifteen minutes. OK?"

I agree, and Peter grabs his bag, along with the paediatric airway kit, and swings out of the door. I see him skip over a few car hoods, and then he's out of sight.

Paediatric calls are bullshit 90% of the time. There's nothing like a distraught parent to give dramatically exaggerated reports to dispatch. Usually, a seizing child looks more frightening than it actually is, and by the time we arrive, they're usually postictal (meaning the seizure is over).

The remaining 10 % tend to be the really bad ones.

I now find myself questioning my decision to let Peter run ahead. His IV skills keep making me forget he's not a full paramedic yet. I just hope he's got everything under control up there.

I pull up in the middle of the street eight minutes later, leave the lights on, ignore the air horns starting up from behind me, and jump out with the bag and monitor. I've been pretty quick, and I doubt that Peter has that much of a head start on me.

The apartment number we've been given is on the sixth floor. I half expect to run into Peter as I step out of the elevator, probably very much out of breath, but all I see is a billowing curtain on a wide-open window in the hall. The apartment door stands ajar, and a fat woman ushers me in.

Peter is kneeling on the kitchen floor next to a positively huge kid. It's hard to guess his age. He's probably around twelve, but has to weigh more than 200 pounds.

I don't know what to stare at more: the size of the kid, or the fact that Peter has already gotten an IV, injected him with valium, _and_ did it long enough ago that the drug has taken effect. Or the fact that he's neither out of breath nor seems to have broken a sweat.

What the hell did he do? Fly?

Peter looks at me like he's glad to see me, though I can see that the family gathered around the kid eyes me less than favourably. It's a kind of "And _you_ are…?" stare.

"Hesam, can you put him on the monitor?" Peter asks as he tries for a pulse. The kid seems to be completely out of it.

I shake myself, and attach the monitor electrodes to the boy's chest. His heart rate and pulses are normal for his postictal state, but his lungs sound junky. He probably aspirated some of the vomit I can see on the floor. Seems that Peter managed to stay mostly clear of it this time, apart from kneeling in it.

The boy's blood oxygen (SAT) is below 90%, which is definitely something to worry about.

"Should we try Lasix?" Peter asks.

Lasix can help clear a person's lungs, but mostly in pulmonary oedema, and can go very wrong if contraindicated. I usually avoid giving any Lasix at all. I shake my head emphatically. "Not for patients under twelve, although at his size-" I stop myself, but too late; the parent's scowls have definitely deepened. I'm unflustered. Don't be mad at _me_ for pointing out your unhealthy lifestyle, I think to myself.

We end up bagging the boy via non-rebreather, which boosts his SATs to 95%, but his state still means we would have taken him in – even if the family didn't insist on it. Which they do.

"Are you just going to stand there?" the father, a red-faced, heavy-set man around fifty, asks. Peter is bagging, and as a matter of fact, I am standing there. While I'm waiting for the guy's wife to dig up the sheet with their son's medication. "Shouldn't you be getting a stretcher or something?"

"The stretcher wouldn't fit in the elevator," I reply levelly. "Unless you'd prefer us to lean your son against the wall." I don't say I might be getting the stair chair, but this guy has me seriously pissed by now. And in that instant, his wife comes waddling from the bedroom with the medication list.

I sit down at the table – which is apparently seen as the next major transgression on my part – and quickly scribble down the patient's personal data as well as the medications he's on. It's rather a lot for a boy his age. I only note down the most important things – I can do the rest later, such as actions taken on scene and the narrative – and am just about to get up and get the chair when the father says, "Are you going to take my son to the hospital now, or are you going to – I don't know, pray to Mecca first, or shoot down a couple of church workers?"

I can only stare at the man, completely speechless. Which is probably his good luck as well as mine. I deal with a lot of things like these, though rarely of this scale. Most of the time, I find that the uniform helps.

Peter, in his unobtrusively deescalating way, steps in. "Hesam, why don't you get the stair chair. He's satting at 98%; I'll just carry him and you meet me halfway."

I know he's right, though right now, an outright confrontation would have been so much more satisfying.

I give him an abrupt nod and leave, without a word to the family, stuffing the run report into my bag as I go. It's all I can take my anger out on right now.

I get the chair, and meet Peter on the third floor. He's carrying that killer whale of a kid as of it was the nimble preschool kid our inner eye showed us at hearing "paediatric". I know he's fit, but this is weird.

"He must have very light bones," Peter remarks as he sits the boy in the chair. We take the elevator down, and when we lift the kid onto our stretcher, I am under the impression that he doesn't have very light bones at all. 200 pounds is nothing I haven't hauled around before, even alone for a brief period of time, but Peter makes it look very easy. I know it's unfair, but that makes me even more resentful, although he hasn't done anything wrong today. Except maybe suggesting Lasix.

The boy's father now appears at the ambulance, to go to the hospital with us. Peter lets me drive and stays in back, so I don't have to deal with him, but knowing he's there is bad enough.

We leave the boy in the paediatric ward at Mercy Heights, and as we go back, Peter casts me a sidelong glance. "Hey. I'm really sorry. I guess some people's minds are just too narrow to realise not all Muslims are terrorists. Don't let it get to you. He was just worried about the kid, I guess."

"And what makes you think I'm a Muslim?" I snap at Peter. I realise I'm being unfair, but I'm pissed, and he's there, the only available target for my righteous wrath, and he's being pretty narrow-minded himself right now.

Peter looks dumbstruck at realising his mistake. Damn, that felt good.

He doesn't say anything else, and neither do I as we get our run times, restock, and remake the stretcher. The silence drags on as we sit back in the truck and clear.

I realise he's not going to restart a conversation, either for fear of putting his foot in it again or because he thinks I was being unfair to him, so after a while, I sigh.

"It's OK," I tell him. "I didn't mean to imply you were as bad as that guy back there. Although especially you Catholics can be pretty pig-headed about that kind of stuff."

He gives me a strange look.

"And what makes you think I'm a Catholic?" he asks.

I stare at him, just as dumbstruck as he was before. I'm not used to being out-prejudiced.

Then I realise what the strange look is. He can barely keep his face from splitting in two. After a few moments, he bursts out laughing.

I fight it for a moment before I join in.

"You know," he says when we've calmed down somewhat, still grinning, "you were right about me though. I _am_ a Catholic."

Boy, am I glad that at least I was jumping to the right conclusions.


	12. Of squeamies and maniacs, August 2007

**Of squeamies and maniacs**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 4 August, 2007, 4:56 PM

Working with so many different people over just a couple of weeks has given me the chance to fine-tune the authoritative _Malek Typology of Contemporary Paramedics_, which I'm proud to share here for the first time.

Working with Peter Petrelli has also, rather single-handedly, resulted in the need for a previously unknown type. But more about that later.

First, there's the doc-a-medic. This type is by no means the most common, but nevertheless it's one that everyone has met and worked with. They're the ones who just stay in the trauma (or cardiac) room after delivering a patient, more or less unobtrusively, and are allowed to pass tubes or get lines, do a thoracostomy here or maybe a triple bypass there. I'm joking. But some of them would. They chat to the doctors rather than the nurses, who regard them as valued advisors rather than ambulance drivers who keep getting in the way of people doing the _actual_ job, and are asked frequently when they'll finally go to medical school. Most of them do just that, or they'll end up as supervisors.

Mercy Heights has two of those. Or maybe one and a half. Karen O'Neill qualifies in some ways. She's got the medical knowledge, but she's a medic through and through. She wants neither the doctor's degree nor the desk job that goes with supervisor.

Our resident doc-a-medic is Gerald Macmillan. Like Karen, he's been working as a medic in NYC for almost twenty years, but unlike her, he got into EMS after dropping out of medical school. He says he could take it up again at any time, and in all fairness to him, he very probably could. He certainly has demonstrated a lot of knowledge and ingenuity in the field. And a lot of commitment is needed to last in this job, and in this city, for such a long time. Gerald will forever be remembered for picking up a fifteen-year-old boy who had overdosed on crack, and when he berated him forcefully all through the ride to the hospital, the boy finally said, "Fuck off! You're not my mother!"

Gerald replied, "No, and I know that 'cause I delivered you, you little piece of shit!"

That last remark probably crossed the line to another type of paramedic, and that is the cynic. Many people think the cynic is burnt out, but most of the time, that's not the case. If you're truly burnt out, you don't last. Although it can be argued that many cynics are recovered burnouts.

The true cynic cynicises about everything and everyone. Nobody is safe: from the triage nurse, the paramedic's natural enemy, the ER doctor who makes a decision the paramedic wouldn't have made, the nursing home nurse, even the pretty one, to the hypochondriac patient and, if he's really unlucky, even the patient who is actually in distress, they may all get their share. The only ones who are relatively safe are usually the cynic's partners. Otherwise, I don't know how Karen O'Neill could still put up with Nicholas Greentree.

You have to hand them one thing: Cynics are usually exceptionally witty, so working with them can be a lot of fun (the less witty cynics tend to be categorised as the much more obnoxious subtype _assholes_). But you're also in constant danger of turning into one yourself, and God have mercy on your soul if you ever find yourself in any real distress and you get picked up by not one but two cynics.

There are two types the cynic doesn't get along well with, and who they love to poke fun at. Those are the squeamie, and the Mother Theresa.

Of course, a particularly evil-minded cynic can have a lot of fun working with a squeamie. This sort of fun is typically one-sided. The cynic (who is almost invariably more experienced than the squeamie) will probably ask his squeamie partner to do those MVA extractions where dustpan and brush would come in a lot handier than a spine board or cervical collar. Almost certainly, he'll have him search for a vein on an HIV or hepatitis patient. Squeamies will spend a lot of time retching, standing around helplessly on scene, do loooong resupply runs to avoid having to go out there again, and you usually end up having to tell them what to do every few minutes.

Like burnt-out medics, squeamies don't last long. Most of them quit at some point. Squeamies with connections are sometimes promoted to supervisor (which is a bad way to go for all concerned, especially for a squeamie's former cynic partner, who may be in for a lot of very ugly payback).

And then there's the Mother Theresa.

A lot of paramedics start out as Mother Theresas, but very few manage to keep it up. Working in the inner city for a few years will do that to you. Most paramedics whom I consider deserving of their patches in any way still have some small but persistent amount of Mother Theresa stashed somewhere deep inside of them, even if it's not always apparent.

Most paramedics fall into more than one of those categories most of the time, to varying degrees. As for me, I consider myself as a surprisingly well-balanced mix of a cynic and Mother Theresa (now isn't that a disturbing image), with some very rare instances of doc-a-medic thrown in, which I reserve for the few times when I encounter a doctor who truly and clearly doesn't know what they're doing.

Peter? When I first met him, I had him booked down as one of the most typical Mother Theresas I'd ever met. I expected him to come around at some point, and after working with him again for a week now, I daresay he has – but in a direction I've never encountered before. What would describe him best right now is _maniac_.

While Peter has never been comfortable with the idea that there will always be times when the Reaper is quicker than us, now, he's downright refusing it.

We're dispatched to an MVA mid-town, and are the first to arrive on scene. A truck has spun out of control, sliding against a wall and pinning a Ford Mustang in between. The truck driver appears mostly unhurt; there are a lot of other cars involved, but none as badly as the Ford. Peter jumps out of the rig immediately, running for it. The Ford has been squeezed up against the wall, resting on the ground by no more than one of its tyres as far as I can see. The windshield is cracked, so I can't see inside from a few yards away, but there's blood on the cracks.

Seeing Peter is about to climb up on the hood of the Ford, I yell at him to stop it. He acts as if he didn't hear. Cursing, I get out a longboard, collar, bag, and monitor, and follow him.

When I reach him, he's perched precariously on the hood, which slants at a 45 degree angle, and is leaning around to peer into the side window.

"Give me a collar, Hesam, will ya?" Peter says, not looking at me as he extends his hand for it.

I give it to him, adding, "Get off that as soon as you're done, you hear me? That thing isn't safe. It could crash down any second."

"Can't," I hear him reply as he twists himself to reach through the side window. "She's bleeding badly. Can't palpate a pulse. We need to get her out at once."

I realise this is 13 June all over again. "Peter," I say, with as much authority and reason as I can. "Get out of there. The fire department will be here in two minutes."

"Yeah, and it'll take them another fifteen minutes to move the truck and extricate her, by which time she'll be dead," he says flatly. "I can do this. I've got a pretty good hold up here right now, and I don't want to chance losing that."

Looking at him, I can't help but think the "pretty good hold" he's got looks awfully like a bird perched on a rather weirdly angled branch.

"You realise you're gonna kill her, yourself, and quite possibly me if the Ford crashes down on its remaining three tyres."

"Got a seatbelt cutter?" is the logical reply.

I roll my eyes. "Peter, I've never had a seatbelt cutter."

"Damn." I can't see what he's doing, his entire upper half having vanished through the smashed-out side window, but then I hear something ripping.

"OK, I've got her free," he says. I find myself fighting the mental image of him ripping the seatbelt with is bare hands. "Get the board as close to the car as you can, OK? I'm gonna pull her out now."

I wouldn't have thought it possible, but somehow he manages to maintain his hold, and his balance, while vanishing into the interior with an even larger percentage of his upper body. When he emerges, he's holding a rather large woman of around fifty, who is pale and obviously unconscious, as well as weighing around two hundred pounds.

"Peter," I say, quite urgently now. "I can't get the board up there. I can't lift it over my head while you put her on it, and I can't rest it against the hood either. It's not stable."

I can see his mind racing, while he holds on to the half-extricated patient. In addition to being unstable, it's too narrow to wield around a longboard. "All right, change of plan," he says. "I'm gonna carry her down."

The truck's tractor unit towers over the Ford next to Peter, and he braces himself against a dent in the door, tests its stability, and then climbs down, not using his hands as he still has to hold on to the patient. I can barely watch, thinking he's going to slip any second, but he doesn't.

As soon as he's close enough, I reach up and take the woman's legs – both of which appear broken – and together, we ease her down on the board. Her colour doesn't look good, but I agree with Peter that there might still be hope we'll save her.

"Let's get her out," he pants, grasping the handles of the board as soon as he's slid off the Ford, and we nearly collide with two firefighters, who are staring at us – mostly, at Peter – after witnessing the last half minute of his impromptu extrication.

"What they hell do you think you're doing?" one of them asks.

Peter gives them a grin deserving of the term "manic". "Saving a life," he replies, and we don't waste another moment on scene, get the patient into our rig, and are out.

Peter works feverishly in the back while I drive to the nearest hospital. When I open the back doors, I find he's gotten in two IVs, has her on oxygen, and has managed to splint the worst of her fractures. Her blood pressure, from what I see on the monitor, is a bit low and her heart rate a bit high, but as far as we're concerned, we did our jobs well.

Later, Peter gets berated by the shift supervisor for failing to wait until the scene was safe. I get my share of it as well, since I failed to make him see reason.

I can tell Peter doesn't care. He's in a great mood for the rest of the day. When we get permission to head in at seven, Supervisor Vasquez is trying to find someone to take over the shift of Doug Richards, who has reported in sick an hour ago.

Peter says he can take it, and I shake my head as I join him for a coffee and a sandwich in the cafeteria before his second shift starts.

"Vasquez wasn't _that_ mad at you," I tell him. "And anyway, you really want to challenge your good luck?"

He gives me a wolfish grin. "Absolutely."

I shake my head.

Maniac.


	13. How to get a life, August 2007

_Ever since introducing Hesam's brother being detained by offended airport security, I've wanted to bring him back and see what kind of person he is. And now I want to use him again. The guy's fun. XD_

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**How to get a life**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 13 August, 2007, 11:04 PM

My wakeup song of the day is _The Fray_'s "How to save a life." Sounds like a nice way for a paramedic to start the day.

Truth be told, many a day goes by when we don't save a life. That doesn't even necessarily mean we _fail_ to save one. On a normal day, we're just the guys who drive the white taxi.

Right now, Peter flatly refuses to acknowledge the existence of normal days. I hear he's been in every day of the week, and seems determined to set up a new world record of lives saved by paramedic per month.

"Dude," I say as he greets me, already finished with the checkup. "I heard you worked a double on Saturday? On your day off?"

He shrugs. "Yeah."

"And Hannah told me you pulled two kids from a burning house?"

He gives another shrug, somewhat sheepishly. I simply can't make any sense of him. He doesn't even flaunt all those lives he saves. When he encounters a situation where any action on his part could make a difference, he goes into maniac mode; when you want to congratulate him afterwards, he seems almost embarrassed about it.

"Hey." I get into the driver's seat and look at him closely. "You got debts or something?"

He gives me a mystified look.

"All those shifts you're working."

Understanding seems to sink in rather gradually, and I feel a pang of envy as I realise that he's probably never had any real problems with money in his life.

"Uh, yeah," he finally says. "I guess you can call it debts."

It's obvious he's being metaphorical, but he doesn't offer any more, so I decide not to ask.

We're called for respiratory distress at a nursing home soon after clearing, and I get a history and orders from the nursing home nurses while Peter loads our patient, an unresponsive 67-year-old man, into the ambulance and puts him on oxygen.

I learn our patient is asthmatic, and has suffered a stroke this past March, which left him with partial paralysis. Among the papers the nurse hands me is a pale yellow sheet with a bright red DNR order at the top.

Damn. I knew this had to come at some point. I wonder how Peter'll take this.

Peter has put the man on a non-rebreather and is checking his vitals as I come back to the rig. In probably two out of three calls, I let him tech – because he's good at what he does and still needs some practice to get better at it. This time, I don't want him in the back with a patient he's not allowed to save. DNR means "Do Not Resuscitate", but I have a feeling Peter wouldn't even refrain from resuscitating if it said DNREIYPP – do not resuscitate even if you're Peter Petrelli.

"Let me tech this one, OK?" I say.

He looks at me quizzically. "Why?"

"He's got a DNR."

I can see his jaw working. "It's fine," he says. "I used to be a hospice nurse, remember?"

"You sure?"

"Yeah. At least with you driving, we'll stand a chance of making it to the hospital before he does code."

I give him a reassuring chuckle, and get into the driver's seat. I key the lights but not the sirens, and pull out.

It's awfully quiet in the back. Peter's gotten in a line, but for the past minutes, I've just seen him sitting there whenever I've looked in the rear-view mirror.

"How's it going?" I ask.

"Not good," he says. "He's satting at 85 percent. Pulse of ninety-six." He gives me a dubious look. "Step it up to a one?"

"Let's," I say as I hit the sirens. "How much oxygen you got him on?"

"Ten litres. I'm going for fifteen now."

I nod my acknowledgement.

We move forward marginally faster as the cars ahead of us try to give way, and a minute later, Peter informs me, "His SAT's down to seventy."

I can see only his eyes in the mirror, and it's hard to tell what's going through his head at that moment.

"He's in v-fib," Peter says quietly, another minute later. "I'm not forbidden to give him lidocaine, right?"

I sigh. "Try Amiodarone."

"Why?"

"I like it better."

He gives a weak chuckle and I hear him getting something out of the biotech. "What's the dosage for Amio again?"

"Give him 300 mg, slow drip."

Everything is quiet back there as Peter works. It feels eerie, somehow inappropriate. A guy's dying in the back of our rig, and we're not even going into a small amount of chaos for his sake. But it's simply not needed. In a normal cardiac arrest – the ones you do resuscitate – you've got so much to do with aggressive airway management, pushing drugs, defibrillating, doing CPR, ventilating in between, making patches to the hospital, most of which isn't an option here. Peter pushes the drugs, I drive and patch. We wait.

Our patient is in asystole when I pull up at the hospital five minutes later. We wheel him in quickly, but they just watch the unchanged flatline on the monitor and call him.

After we've remade the stretcher and handed in the run form, we encounter a young woman, a man who must be her husband, and a three-year-old girl in the corridor in front of the cardiac room. The woman's eyes are red, but she seems composed. She's talking to Dr Simmons, and at some point, they turn and Dr Simmons points to us.

The woman comes towards us. "Thank you," she says, very quietly.

We nod, shake hands, offer a few words, and are out again.

For half an hour, we're sitting in our rig before the next call comes in. Peter's reading; a small blue and yellow paperback lying on his knees.

"What's that?"

He flips over the cover for me to see. "Good old Bledsoe. Reading up on Amiodarone."

I give him an acknowledging nod.

At some point, the shift supervisor walks out to us. "One of you guys free tonight?" he asks, leaning on the open passenger window. "I've just had Doug Richards calling in sick again."

"Not me," I say. "It's my brother's birthday. He's coming to collect me tonight after shift. He'd rip off my head and spit down my neck if I didn't come."

Jackson looks at Peter, who nods. "Sure, no problem."

"Thanks, man," Jackson says, and walks back to the ED.

I cast a sidelong glance at Peter, who is already engrossed in _Pocket Reference For ALS Providers_ again. "You don't have a lot of hobbies, do you?"

He gives another of those quiet chuckles that somehow forestall any further inquiry, and goes on reading.

* * *

Our last call of the day has us working overtime. My brother is already waiting in front of the EMT room, rolling his eyes as we arrive at seven-forty.

"Ever heard of a watch?" he asks, tapping his.

"Sorry," I say. "But the parents of seizing kids usually don't appreciate it if you just leave because your shift is over."

"Screw them," he says brightly as I let him into the EMT room with us. He's been here on occasion, even if the supervisors don't like us taking other people into our "sanctuary."

"Still out of order?" he says, disappointed, as he looks at the soda machine.

"Yeah. This is Peter, by the way," I say, indicating my partner. "He knows all about being picked on by older brothers." Peter takes a step towards him and they shake.

"Hey, nice to meet you. I'm Jafar."

Once again, Peter is political correctness personified. He hardly does a double-take, but enough of one for Jafar to carry on, "Yeah, that's right, like the one from _Aladdin_. Guess I'm lucky my folks didn't call me Quasimodo, huh?"

(Quasimodo, that's a nice one. Jafar rarely uses the same one twice. He had me in hysterical fits at my High School graduation, when he used Cruella deVil introducing himself to one of my teachers.)

Peter laughs, passing the test, and Jafar looks around. "Care to join us? We're going to Houlihan's; we'll be a bunch of twenty or so people. I told Hesam he could bring someone, but knowing him, he didn't find a date again. I think it turns off the ladies if you got bloodstains on your shoes."

"Hah hah," I say, glaring at Jafar, and Peter grins as he shakes his head.

"Sorry, I can't," he says. "I gotta run. I told Shannon I'd be there in five minutes."

Jafar whistles. "Sounds like some good entertainment too," he says with a wink. "So some girls don't mind bloodstains?"

"Shannon is a fellow paramedic, she gathers enough bloodstains of her own, and what he means is he's got another shift." I put my jacket into my locker, after inspecting it for bloodstains.

"Ah. Pity. So… have fun, I guess," he says as Peter changes into a fresh shirt.

"You too," Peter says, slapping our hands as he turns to leave.

"Committed guy," Jafar remarks as we get into his car.

"Pretty much."

"I like him. I think we should hook him up with Mina."

I roll my eyes. "Frank wouldn't like that," I remind him.

"Yeah, that's kinda the whole point."

"Whether you like it or not, our sister _has_ a boyfriend. And anyway, with all the doubles he's running, I doubt Peter has any time for girls." I hit on the radio. The kind that makes music, not the kind that deals out dispatches. "And now, I've had enough about work for today. I'm starving."

.

.

.

.

.

.

* * *

_Knowing that a lot of you also liked Trauma, I thought I'd mention that I've hugely revised several stretches of it, mainly chapter four (just after Peter has been shot). I'd love feedback on the revised bit, if anyone feels like reviewing again. :) _

_And as always, thank you all so much for reading. It makes me very happy that this has so many readers even though it's such an insignificant little ficcie. Still, it's a lot of fun to write, and, I hope, to read. :) _


	14. Too close, August 2007

**Too close**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 31 August, 2007, 13:12 PM

You must be getting tired of me saying I can't make any sense of Peter, but: I can't make any sense of Peter.

We're doing another double (a sixteen hour shift from eight a. m. to midnight). Peter hasn't been doing much _but_ doubles this month, but I've done at least five or six as well. People keep calling in sick, it's not even funny anymore. Maybe that's also the reason for all those MVAs we're doing. Wonder if there's anything in the water.

It's a hot, oppressive day. Before nightfall, we transport several elderly people for dizziness, a few falls, one broken hip. Our average patient today weighs around 250 pounds, and once again, Peter copes with that a lot better than I do. I go through at least three litre bottles of water (and two shirts, not counting the one that gathered some urine from a lady with renal failure), and I'm relieved beyond words when it starts raining at 7 PM. The temperature immediately drops by about fifteen degrees.

Half an hour later, we've just cleared from a call that ended with a refusal, and are stuck in a traffic jam when our number is called for another MVA. Peter acknowledges. "We're twelve blocks out," he says. "We're on it."

Twelve blocks doesn't sound like a lot, but right now, it looks as if they might take us between ten and fifteen minutes.

"On it?" I say. "There's just parking going on here. We're not going anywhere in this mess."

Peter gives this some consideration, then he says, "You're right," and unstraps.

I stare at him. "What are you doing?"

"Going on foot."

"You're crazy. We're twelve blocks away. You'll never make it on foot."

He's shouldered his bag and tells me he knows a shortcut, and is gone.

I stare after him, then I hit the lights and sirens and laboriously start moving.

I pull up on scene eleven minutes later. There are the wrecks of a cab and a passenger car, the car suspended in mid-air, much reminiscent of that Ford last month, Peter's last impromptu extraction. I note that the car's driver's door is missing.

I'm the second ambulance responding on scene. Hannah Davies and Gerald Macmillan were luckier than I was, coming from an east-west street, which was apparently marginally clearer. They're taking care of the cab driver, who has a cut on his forehead but is alert and breathing.

"Take a look at the cab's passenger," Gerald tells me. "He told me he was OK, but best check to make sure. Board him just in case."

"Where's Peter?" I ask. I can't see him anywhere.

"Gone with Seven Lincoln," Hannah says. "Craig and Will were the first on scene. Well, after Peter. Apparently, there was a pregnant woman in the car up there who went into contractions, and they took her to Mount Sinai." She eyes me. "And where were _you_?"

"Stuck in a traffic jam." I feel left high and dry. I can see that Peter needed to go with Will Hawkins and Craig Moore, as both are just basic level EMTs and they'd have needed a medic riding with them, but this is just _wrong_.

I go check on the cab's passenger, a forty-year-old man, who, upon closer questioning, says he feels a pain in his neck and shoulder. It might just be a case of insuransitis, but protocol says I have to transport him boarded.

I grab one of the firefighters that have arrived on scene, and he agrees to drive while I stay in back with the patient. I put a collar on him and c-spine him, and put him on oxygen. His pressure is a little high, though I can't find anything broken or otherwise seriously injured as I palpate him. Still, I pop in an IV. He has neck pain, he gets the whole deal. He refuses pain medication.

The dispatcher sends us to the Metropolitan, and I curse under my breath as I realise I will have to embark on a minor odyssey to go and retrieve my partner.

It takes us another thirteen minutes to reach the hospital. I give my report to the triage nurse, who has the man put on a stretcher in the hall.

I assure my patient he'll be seen by a doctor soon, note down the most important patient info – birth date, full name, state insurance number, the things I won't remember in an hour's time – remake the stretcher, and clear, getting permission to go to Mount Sinai to collect Peter.

The streets have cleared somewhat, but it's past eight thirty when I arrive. I walk straight to the triage desk and ask, "Did another medic just get in here with a pregnant woman from an MVA? Around an hour ago?"

"Yes," the nurse says. "Poor girl, pregnant with twins in that crash. The first one was crowning when they brought her in. She's given birth to them by now. They're up in the L&D."

I thank her and take the elevator up, hoping I might catch Peter, and tell him his ride is here.

First, I run into several reporters and photographers loitering around, doubtlessly hot on the tail of an excellent story. They try to pounce on me until I tell them I had absolutely nothing to do with rescuing that woman.

Before I run any danger of loitering as well, a nurse exits the room the mother and her babies are in, and, obviously thinking I was the one who got them here, ushers me in.

I have no problems whatsoever with childbirth, but I feel awfully out of place.

The woman is on her bed, a bundle in each arm, and her husband is here as well. He, too, thinks I'm here because I was the one who rescued his wife, and I have to tell him no, but I'm looking for that guy too.

"If you see him, can you please send him over?" the woman says. "I didn't even get a chance to thank him."

I promise, and go down to the ED again, take a look into the EMT room, until I find Peter standing at the triage desk, writing his run report.

"There he is," I say, and he gives me a quick grin, then ducks his head and continues scribbling. I remember the unfinished run report of the cab passenger, and follow his example.

"So, that pregnant woman?" I say as I write. "Heard she delivered twins. Named them both Peter."

He hardly looks up. "The _pregnant woman's_ name," he informs me, "is Christie. And she had twin girls." He signs the run report and hands it to the nurse. "Named them Hailey and Katie."

"Hey, they're still up in the L&D," I tell him. "They'd like to thank you in person—"

"Good," he interrupts me, gives me a clap on the shoulder, and walks out to the ambulance bay.

So this is where my introduction comes in again. How can anyone make sense of that?

By this time, I don't know whether to be pissed or feel sorry for him.

I finish my run form, stuff it into my bag and go after him. I find him in the ambulance, as usual, on the passenger seat. He hardly acknowledges me, stares ahead, brooding. He acts as if he'd just fumbled up badly, not like someone who's just saved three lives.

I get in on the driver's side and strap in. Before I clear us, I drive by the Metropolitan to drop off my run form.

We do another call for a nursing home patient with COPD. When we are at Mercy Heights to restock, I run into Doug Richards. Peter is back in the rig remaking the stretcher.

"Dude," Doug says. "What was that about Peter rescuing a pregnant woman from an MVA?" He seems eager to hear the entire war story first hand. Sorry, buddy, you're barking up the wrong tree.

"You'll need to ask Peter about that," I reply curtly. "I wasn't there."

He looks perplexed, but doesn't ask any further. "Hey," he says as I turn to go. "When are you free? Midnight?"

"Yeah."

"We're going out after shift; Tammy and Bernard are coming too. Meet us at the EMT room?"

I feel pretty tired, but tomorrow is my day off, so this looks like a good way to celebrate that. "Yeah, sure. Where you going?"

"Houlihan's. Ask Peter if he'll join us, OK?"

I give a weak laugh. "I'll try."

"Great," he says. "Seeya then!"

Peter is done with the stretcher when I return, and clears us as soon as I arrive. It's eleven fifteen; sure enough, the last call of the day has us working until twenty minutes past midnight.

We're in the EMT room after shift, and I sit on the sofa as I watch him changing his shirt. None of the others are in yet.

"What?" he says as he notices my stare.

"You single-handedly saved three lives," I say. It seems he needs to be reminded. "If it was me, I'd be floating on cloud nine right now."

"I am," he says, not looking at me.

"Could have fooled me," I murmur. When he makes no reply, I ask, "What's going on with you?"

He finally turns, tucking in his shirt. "If I'd showed up thirty seconds later, that woman… her babies… they'd be dead. It's too close, man. I gotta be faster."

"Dude, you got there faster than humanly possible. If I was a religious man, I'd think it was a miracle."

He gives a humourless chuckle. "A miracle," he repeats, then he walks towards the door. "Catch ya tomorrow."

"Hang on," I say, incredulous. "Where you going?"

"Going on shift."

"We just got off a double."

"Yeah, I know, but James is sick, I figured I'd cover for him."

"Too late, Jackson's already covering." I lean forward. He stares at me, as if he's groping for a reason why he absolutely, desperately has to go on shift again.

"Dude," I say. "There's a life outside this place. And me and some of the guys are going out – Houlihan's still open! Come with us."

He doesn't hesitate for a second before declining. "I'm good, man. Seeya tomorrow. Have fun." He slaps my hand, and is off.

I sit back and stare at the wall. What'll he do if he doesn't find a free ambulance, I ask myself.

Well, he doesn't need an ambulance. He's made that abundantly clear. He'll just hop around, use short cuts, pull pregnant women from crashed vehicles, and hope he'll find some idiot to give him a ride.

Doug and Bernard Adams come in five minutes later, and Tammy Young soon afterwards.

"What about Peter?" Doug asks, looking around.

"Working," I say. "Let's go."


	15. Clam chowder, September 2007

**Clam chowder**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 2 September, 2007, 14:46 PM

Peter and I work a night shift, starting midnight, on Sunday. I'm in a quarter hour early, but hear Peter's already gotten the ambulance keys.

I meet Hannah Davies talking to Jack Mackenzie, who are also starting their tour one. When I come closer, Hannah suddenly breaks off in mid-sentence, the way people do when the one they're talking about suddenly enters a room.

"What?" I say.

Hannah looks at me, then shifts slightly to peer behind me, and I gather they weren't talking about me, but Peter.

"What's he done now?" I say with a sigh. I'm not a great fan of Hannah's. She gossips too much. And I personally maintain that, if any person has a right to be mad at Peter, that's me.

"He brought in a bank clerk stabbed in the back yesterday," she says.

I frown. "He did a shift?"

"No, did it in his free time, apparently. Just heard it from Nurse Zhao in triage."

I have no idea what to say to that, so I just shrug.

Hannah pushes on. "How the heck does he do it?" she asks me. "Then there was that cop last week. The attacker just let him go when Peter tapped his shoulder?"

"He did something more than tap his shoulder," I say. "Peter's pretty good in a fight, though he doesn't really look it."

"He didn't arrange that or something?" she asks suspiciously.

"_Arrange_ it?" I repeat. "No way. I was there." _For a change_.

"And all those accidents? Just look at him. He's… glory-hounding. Could he have staged them? Who's to say he doesn't help things along? How can a single guy scrounge up so many saves? What about that bus crash a couple of days ago?"

I stare at her. "You think he'd deliberately put dozens or more people at risk for his own gain?"

She just regards me with raised eyebrows, as if to say, "Obviously?"

I don't have an answer to that, just mumble something in the way of "gotta go" and head out.

Peter's moved the rig out of the garage but is sitting on the passenger's seat as I get in, with his door open. There's a delicious, sea-foody smell filling the cockpit.

"Have a nice day off?" I ask him.

"Oh, yeah. Very productive, I got a lot done," he says around a mouthful of whatever's in the paper cup he's eating from. I find myself staring at several cuts on his face. Either he really, really screwed up his last shave, or he's been playing porcupine polo again.

Or it has something to do with the stabbing Hannah mentioned.

"You OK?" I ask, perplexed.

"Oh!" he says, as if he's only just remembered that. "Yeah, that's… just… I'm fine."

Sure you are.

"Is that clam chowder?" I ask, having identified the smell.

"It is," he says, handing me a second cup.

"Smells good," I say. "Where'd you get it?" My knowledge of Lower Manhattan takeout food is legendary, but I haven't discovered a place around here yet that sells decent clam chowder.

"It's from a place called Legal Seafood."

"Never heard of it."

"It's up in Boston," he says.

"Boston."

"Yeah."

"So how did you get it down here?"

He hesitates for a second. "I know a guy," he answers.

Screw Hannah. That stuff smells delicious.

"That's the point where I know enough," I say, shaking my head, as I take the cup from him.

Just then, a code three comes in over the radio. We haven't even cleared yet, it's still five minutes to midnight. At crew change, there's more than enough cars responding.

"Never mind that," I say, realising that Peter isn't following my logic. "We've still got fine minutes before we're on duty." And I might as well start duty on a cup of clam chowder.

I pull up the lid off the cup when I feel something like a gust of wind from the open passenger door, and find that Peter's gone.

He was here a _second_ ago. Now I can't even see him.

I stop my cursing just long enough to call Dispatch. "Zero-Two-Victor, ten-sixty-three." Meaning, I'm responding to the call.

"Two Victor, disregard. We've got two other units responding. There are fewer victims than was first reported."

I close my eyes and silently count to three. "Problem is, Dispatch, that my partner's already responding."

"Two Victor, ten-five." This means that they haven't got a clue what the hell I'm talking about.

"Just dispatch me, Kathy, OK?" I say.

There's a slight pause, then the dispatcher says, "Two Victor, ten-four." Translation: I still don't have the slightest idea what is going on, but go ahead.

I actually manage to beat the other two responding units to the scene, for which I pay the price of clam chowder on my pants. And by whatever route Peter got that stuff down from Boston, it was still _very_ hot.

By the time I get there, I've gotten an update. Only two units responding now; it's a stabbing, but apparently, the attacker is already gone. There's just one victim.

Stabbing.

This is supposed to tell me something.

PD is on scene when I pull up near a subway station entrance three minutes later. I grab my medical bag and load the monitor and oxygen unit onto the stretcher. Peter is at the top of the stairs, kneeling beside a man in his mid to late forties and staunching several heavily bleeding wounds in his abdomen. The man is barely responsive.

"Thank God," Peter says as he sees me. "Let's get him out of here, quick!"

"C-spine?" I ask. "Did he fall down the stairs?" I can see blood down there.

Peter looks as if he's going to put up an argument, but has to see I'm right. He tells me to keep pressure on the wound and jumps up to get a spine board.

I don't even have time to palpate a pulse before he's back with the board. I stare at him. He proceeds to collar the patient.

"Let's get him loaded, c'mon," he says, rolling the man on his side so we can get the board under him.

"Attacker was already gone when I arrived here," he tells me as we wheel the man to our rig. "I couldn't palpate a pulse. His breathing sounds OK." He pats the man's hand. "Hold on, Noah, all right? We'll be at the hospital in just a couple of minutes." He locks the stretcher in place and looks at me.

"I'll tech, OK?" he says.

"Naturally," I reply, in what has to be the most biting tone he's ever heard from me.

"Thanks," he says, getting in the back. I can't believe he's utterly oblivious to the resentment in my voice.

I get around the truck and climb into the driver's seat, keying the lights and sirens.

I can hear him working feverishly in the back, as he puts the man on the monitor and gets an IV.

"Shall I call someone, tell them what happened?" I hear him ask the patient.

I have a hard time understanding the response, but it sounds like, "No way. If you call…, she'd ground me."

Either Peter knows the guy, or he is way screwed up. Things just keep getting stranger and stranger.

Peter has managed to get one IV in the short ride to the hospital. We rush the man into the trauma room. Just before the staff sends us out, I see Peter squeezing the man's hand. "I'm so sorry," he says.

The look on his face reminds me of a few days ago, after he pulled that pregnant woman from a car. It's one of nagging failure.

I pull a run form from my bag. "You didn't remember to get his state insurance card, did you?" I ask.

He starts slightly, as if he's forgotten I'm there. Then he shakes his head.

I sigh. "Noah, you said his first name was?" I ask as I write it down.

"Yeah. Noah Bennet." He looks over my shoulder. "Bennet with one _t_."

I cross out the superfluous_ t_ and raise an eyebrow at him. "You don't happen to know his birth date?" I ask.

He looks genuinely unhappy. "No."

"Address?"

"Last I knew, it was Washington, D. C."

"That's something," I say. "You know him?"

"Yeah," Peter says, still with that thousand mile stare. "He's a friend."

Again, after being perfectly in the mood to shout at him just a few minutes before, I feel sorry for Peter, without really knowing why.

"Why'd you tell him you were sorry?" I ask him.

He visibly shakes himself.

"Well, look at him," he says. "You wanna find a friend like that?"

No, I do not.

But I have a feeling that wasn't the whole truth.

* * *

He checks back at Mercy Heights all during our shift whenever he gets a chance, and looks visibly relieved when we finally learn that Noah Bennet is stable, that no major organs were injured, and that he's doing well under the circumstances. When we go out of service at eight twenty, he's suddenly gone again as soon as the ambulance is stocked up.

Hannah Davies sees me coming in alone, and gives me a stare that says, "See?"

I just push past her and go home.


	16. Chauffeur, September 2007

**Chauffeur**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 6 September, 2007, 11:32 AM

Wednesday is my day off, so I am extremely pissed when my phone rings at 6.30. There's only one thing this can mean.

"Hesam?" Supervisor Vasquez says. "Sorry to wake you." You're not. I can tell. "I need someone to take over for Jerry. He just called in."

Having succeeded in opening my eyes, I try to process Vasquez' words. "What tour's that?" I slur.

"Tour two. Can you be there in one and a half hours?"

Why don't you ask Peter? I think to myself. At least I thought I was thinking to myself. Apparently, however, my "mute" function isn't completely operational at this hour yet, as Vasquez replies, "He's already taking over for James McElroy."

Two people calling in sick for the same tour? Man, we're screwed.

"I'll be there," I yawn. "Is there anything else, or can I just snatch another twenty minutes' sleep before I head off to the galley?"

"Actually, there is." Vasquez' tone causes my eyes, which have started to go back into sleep mode by this time, to open again.

"Peter's being sued. A guy who was on the 4-24 bus crash you guys worked last week says Peter dislocated his shoulder."

OK. I'm awake now.

"Dislocated a guy's shoulder?" I echo.

"Guy called William Hooper. Seems Peter ought to take some time off in between shifts." Vasquez definitely sounds angry now. "Jackson gave him the tour last night. If it had been me, I'd have said no. He may look good in the papers, but if he's giving the hospital a bad name—" Vasquez breaks off. "So, I'll put you on the duty roster. See you in two hours."

I lie back in bed, but as tired as I was five minutes ago, I can't go back to sleep.

William Hooper? I can't remember that name. And feel pretty sure I would. I usually don't remember all my patients' names, unlike Peter, but I feel certain I'd have remembered transporting one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The guy's parents must have been fans.

Some medics keep copies of their run forms at home, but I don't. I don't believe in taking work home, and my apartment is too small to pile up boxes of run report copies.

After a few more minutes, I get out of bed and get ready for work. I'm on the night shift again tonight, this time a regular one with Peter, but it seems I'm going to see a lot of the hospital today.

I manage to be at the station at five minutes to eight, again to work with Hannah Davies. She's already gotten the keys. I didn't see Peter when I went inside the ED, and I guess he's already off with Ritchie Gonzales.

Hannah is veritably on the edge of her seat when I enter the ambulance. "Heard it yet?" she asks me without preamble.

Oh shoot. I'm working a shift with Hannah Davies on the day she found out Peter's being sued. Life isn't fair.

"Yeah," I reply noncommittally. "You gonna tech today, or d'you want to drive?"

She completely ignores my question. "I mean, about Peter being sued?"

"_Yeah_," I say again, somewhat more emphatically.

"He had it coming to him, didn't he?" she just charges on, completely oblivious to my tone. I make a mental note to polish up my scathing tone. If other people don't realise I'm being scathing, it definitely needs some work.

"What I'm trying to say," I say pointedly, "is that this is Peter's business, not mine, and not yours."

"But you were there, at that call. Why's he acting like that? He's fishy. His behaviour is totally suspicious."

I get the mike and just clear us.

Hannah tries to get me to talk about Peter several times during the first three hours. I'm not sure if I manage to communicate to her that I don't want to talk about Peter. I take to ignoring her whenever she brings up the topic.

Around 1 p. m., we get permission to head in for lunch. Hannah takes off for the cafeteria, but I tell her I have to check something, and head off to the second floor. There is no way in hell I'll spend my lunchtime avoiding Hannah trying to discuss my regular partner.

I go into the file room and grab a form to request access to my run form of the bus crash. The file clerk greets me with a nod from behind her earphones. I've dealt with her on a few occasions in the past; she's deaf, and doesn't like to talk, which is fine by me just now.

When I hand her my request, I can see her do a slight double-take at reading the patient's name. It's not hard for me to guess that Peter's been here as well, to read up on the guy.

She gives me a print of my run form from the call. Sure enough, there he is, in my handwriting. Hooper, William, treated for a dislocated shoulder.

I say thank you and turn to go, but my foot makes a slurping sound as I stood in something sticky. There's something semi-dried on the floor.

She follows my glance and explains, "I dropped my tea cup earlier."

It's funny; I can hardly recall hearing her speak. Certainly not about tea cups.

"It's OK," I assure her, thank her again, and head out.

I briefly consider getting a sandwich from the cafeteria, but decide against it, and walk back to the ED.

I find Peter at the nurses' station, leafing though what looks like a writ of summons.

"You're being sued?" I ask him as I join him.

"This is a scam," he tells me. "That guy wasn't even in that bus crash."

"According to my log, he was," I inform him. "And the hospital is not gonna take the fault on this. They're gonna blame you."

"For what?" he murmurs, going through the papers again. "I've been nothing but committed."

"Yeah, I know," I say. "You're everywhere. Always the first on scene."

"What's that supposed to mean?" he asks. So I finally have his attention. Either my innuendo skills have become better since this morning, or Peter is smarter than Hannah.

It's probably not _just_ my innuendo skills.

OK, buddy. Better hear this from me. You're not gonna like this.

"There's a couple of people," I say in a low voice, as I see that there are several people, nurses and doctors, watching us, "floating the theory that you're causing the accidents yourself." How did Hannah put it? "Glory-hounding."

"So what, you – believe them?" he says, incredulous.

"They ask if you've been reckless? They ask if you've been behaving suspiciously?" I say. "You have."

"Hesam, come on," he says, in a tone that makes it clear that he thinks I'm being preposterous. "You know me. We're partners."

"Partners?" I echo. I can't believe how he can be such a dickhead. "Man, you run off the second we get on scene." I make a slight pause. "I'm your chauffeur."

I leave him standing there, his jaw working, and go back out to the ambulance bay.

* * *

I blend out Hannah for the rest of our tour. It's not that hard; in the remaining two and a half hours, we run two ALS calls back to back. She does keep her mouth shut while she works.


	17. Normal, September 2007

**Normal**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 6 September, 2007, 12:56 PM

Paramedic partners have sometimes been compared to married couples. (Nick and Karen certainly fit the bill in a lot of ways, even though you should never let them hear that.) You spend an awful lot of time in each other's company, and working with someone you don't get along with can be an extremely tedious affair, even worse, I suppose, than in many other jobs.

Working with somebody you temporarily don't get along with is no better.

I meet Peter at the ambulance bay at a quarter to midnight. It's our usual routine: he's gotten the keys and radios and has even completed the checkup, which only irritates me more. I suppose he's trying to be helpful, but it would have felt better if he hadn't been Mr Perfect just this once.

I greet him noncommittally, and he keeps his reply just as noncommittal. When we sit down to wait for our first call, I take out a newspaper. He probably recognises it as a calculated affront, which it is, since he knows I rarely buy a newspaper, but he just takes out his Bledsoe again and starts reading as well.

We're lucky. The first call comes in at a quarter past midnight.

"Two Victor."

I key the mike. "Two Victor, go ahead."

"Central Park West, a collapsed building. Class David. On a one."

As the directions show up on our computer screen, Peter and I can't help but exchange a glance despite our non-communication. Class David means more than ten victims. This could be bad.

I then remember that his mother lives somewhere there, but the number dispatch gives us is a couple of blocks further south.

We gather that the disaster occurred half an hour ago, and we missed it because we weren't listening to Citywide at the time. They update us after five minutes – it's fewer casualties than initially expected, three of them dead. They don't cancel us, though, in case there's an unforeseen situation.

We pull up thirteen minutes later at a site swarming with FDNY and NYPD; they've got two FDNY ambulances on scene there already, too. I expect to see the remains of a house that must have been there, rubble, walls left standing, any of that kind, but there's nothing there – only a clean circle that looks as if the house has disappeared into a hole in the ground. A little illuminated sculpture stands a few feet from the hole, blinking innocuously, completely unaffected.

I get out on my side, and half expect to see Peter gone by the time I've walked around the truck, but he's there, staring ahead as he shoulders his bag.

An FDNY supervisor comes towards us as we still try to orientate ourselves. "Glad to make you boys come out," he greets us. "Three people died here. Could have been a lot worse."

"What happened?" Peter asks, stunned, looking at the site in the middle of all the emergency vehicles.

"Sinkhole," the man tells us.

"_Sinkhole_?" Peter echoes, incredulous.

I stare, too. Sinkholes are impossible in Manhattan. That's part of why there are so many skyscrapers in one place here.

"The other crews are taking care of a couple of people who made it out in time," a cop in front of a police tape tells us. "We've got search parties with dogs looking for survivors."

I follow his pointing finger to the weird-looking area ten feet away, and find it hard to imagine that anyone could still be alive down there.

"We'll need boards and collars if they extricate someone down there," I tell Peter. He doesn't reply, and I look around for him, irritated. Again, I half expect to find him gone, maybe digging or something, but he's still standing next to an FDNY truck, looking up sharply as he realises I was talking to him. He's clutching his right forearm.

"You OK?" I ask.

He stares at me, then visibly shakes himself. "Got stung by something. Board and collars?"

"Yeah."

He nods, and goes back to our rig to get them. I look after him, puzzled at how… _normally_ he behaves tonight. No running off, no going into maniac mode trying to extricate possible victims all by himself. Even following orders. Or suggestions.

One of the dogs at the hole – though "hole" is the wrong term, as there's a roof on it – suddenly starts barking sharply, and I see the firemen moving over there, shouting orders, trying the stability of the ruins. Peter arrives, longboard and cervical collars under his arm. I can tell he longs to be over there, extricating whoever is alive down there, but there's no way FDNY will let him.

We wait for a quarter hour, until the firefighters have succeeded in freeing a body from the rubble. Even from ten feet away, I have a feeling there's nothing we can do to save the woman. The firemen shout for us to come over, and we approach cautiously, as the ground is shaky beneath our feet, like walking on several feet of rubble that shifts slightly every other second.

Peter gets the board under the woman, and we collar her before we rush her out to the ambulance. If she is alive, or can be brought back, we don't have a second to waste. If she can't be saved, we can just as well find out in the back of our truck, and do everything we can until then.

She's pretty, elegant-looking in a very expensive dress, around forty, though she'd probably have referred to herself as being in her thirties. Both her legs are broken, as is one of her arms. There's blood on her face, but it's already dried. Her pupils are fixed and dilated.

Peter puts her on the monitor in the truck while I snatch us a cop to drive, and jump into the back with Peter. The cop makes liberal use of the sirens, obviously enjoying himself.

"Asystole in all leads," Peter says, unnecessarily, as I put her on the non-rebreather and start bagging. Her chest is barely moving. Peter starts compressions. "Let's tube her," he tells me. "That way, we can give her epi through the tube."

I nod, even though I know it won't do any good. The woman must have been dead for half an hour, and is already turning blue.

I get the tube on my first attempt, and Peter stops compressions and takes over bagging instead as I slam two milligrams of epinephrine through the tube. There's only the slightest of twitches on the flat line on the monitor, and then again, nothing.

We're at the hospital five minutes later, and we rush her into the trauma room. Because she's so young – and rich – they work her for half an hour before they call her, never having gotten a rhythm back.

Peter writes up the run form and rejoins me cleaning and restocking our truck. He looks worn and dejected, but again, he does so in a way I'd expect from any medic who's just failed to revive a patient in his care, not in the self-damning way I've seen from him so often in the past month and a half. It's almost like he's a normal person again. My little pep talk this morning seems to have been vastly successful. I don't feel the need to add another, or say something comforting. He knows as well as I do that this wasn't our life to save. We delivered some perfect care back there. We didn't lose a second; we reeled off a seamless routine. If she could have been saved, we would have saved her. But she couldn't.

"Hey," I say as we put the stretcher back, looking for something friendly to say in an attempt to bury the hatchet. "I like your tattoo."

"What?" he says, confused.

"The compass tattoo," I say, nodding at his arm. I've never noticed it before. "It's cool."

He gives me such a puzzled look that I almost laugh. Thank goodness. I'm not going crazy after all. He's still his weird old self. But at least, he didn't leave me standing anywhere today, which is uncharacteristically considerate of him. I can live with that.

After we clear, I take out my newspaper again, but this time, I hold the sport section out to Peter.

"Thanks," he says with a smile, and takes it.

"What you doing on your day off?" I ask him after a few minutes, during which the radio has been silent. After the collapsed house that started off our shift, it's a slow night.

"Studying," he says with a sigh. "Gerald is riding with me on Friday, to cut me loose."

"Wow!" I say. "I didn't know."

He nods. I realise he hasn't known until yesterday or so either, and we weren't talking.

"But what about that lawsuit?" I ask, frowning.

"Ah," he says, looking a lot more relaxed at the words than I'd have expected. "I talked to the guy earlier today. Well, yesterday. He's dropping the lawsuit."

"Just like that?" I ask, puzzled.

He shrugs. "We talked quite a bit. He'd been having a hard time lately."

I nod, pretending to understand, but I don't.

"You OK about Friday?" I ask.

He shrugs again. "Yeah, guess I am."

"Word to the wise," I say. "Don't study tomorrow night. Do something completely different. Go see a movie or something, to take your mind off things. Go see some _people_."

Peter just nods, and I have a feeling he won't heed my advice.

"If you feel you absolutely have to lock yourself up at home and do something to do with healthcare," I go on, "I can lend you the first season of _Scrubs_."

He gives another nod.

"Or I might ask my sister if she lets you borrow her _Gilmore Girls_ if that's more up your alley," I finish.

He laughs.

Well. I tried.


	18. The Petrelli Connection, September 2007

**The Petrelli Connection**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 9 September, 2007, 10:39 PM

I spend my day off with my brother, who's just come back from a two-week trip to Iran. Jafar is unusually sombre, as he still sees the country as more of "home" than I ever have. I hardly remember it from my childhood, but the two years' age difference between us means he remembers a lot more, and sees that things are just as bad there today as they were when our family left the country in 1979, only in different ways now.

"They've got stories of kid martyrs with machine guns in their schoolbooks," Jafar says, shaking his head. "Their _schoolbooks_! How can anyone ever get back to normal if war is hammered into their heads from first grade?"

I'm still thinking about it all when I arrive at work on Saturday morning. Two Victor is already back from tour one, and I meet Jerry DuPont restocking the truck with Peter helping him.

I considered once or twice calling Peter last night, to ask how his day riding with Gerald went, but it was pretty late when I got home. I'm fairly sure everything went well, but I know from personal experience how much performance anxiety can mess up your preception.

His grin as he looks up tells me it didn't happen to him though. As usual when he should be proud of himself, he looks slightly sheepish as I congratulate him and slap him on his brand new paramedic patch.*

"Everything go well?" I ask.

"Yeah, mostly," he says. "Apart from the drunk we transported who had a blood sugar of 16. I completely forgot to check, and he was too drunk to tell us he was a diabetic."

"Tunnel vision catch up with you then?" I tease.

"Not anymore," he says. "You can be sure the next drunk I pick up gets the whole deal."

"But Gerald still cut you loose? You worked a cardiac arrest? Got the tube?"

"Yeah. Thanks for the tip about Amiodarone in cardiac arrest a few weeks back, by the way."

"It worked?" I ask, delighted.

"No," he says, looking crestfallen. "But apparently Gerald was impressed that I had it on my mental list."

"And hey, you missed something," Jerry now tells me with a grin at Peter. "Your least favourite politician was here yesterday too. Gerald was not amused."

I give him a blank look. "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?"

Jerry gives me an equally blank look. "_Gesundheit_," he says.

I roll my eyes. _New York Post_ reader. "So, if it wasn't him, who d'you mean?"

Peter gives a sigh. "My brother was here yesterday."

"Ah." I keep forgetting that. I give Jerry a glare and say, with an apologetic glance at Peter, "I stopped saying he was my least favourite politician when I started working with you."

He chuckles. "That's terribly kind of you."

"So, you're talking again?" I ask as Jerry leaves, yawning, and we clear.

"Yeah. Well, I mean we're both pretty busy, but yeah, we're talking again."

"He hasn't been making vague allusions about terrorism a lot lately, has he?" I ask, in what I consider a very amiable way of talking about the guy who talked about little _but_ terrorism for months after his election into office. It was the sort of talk that, coming from a politician, makes you worry about your civil rights.

"You got him wrong there, you know," Peter tells me, his voice very serious. "You got him completely wrong. He was never talking about…"

I can see him going through, and rejecting, the terms mentally. _Muslims. Extremists. Arabs_.

"That bunch," I supply.

"Yeah," he nods, grateful.

"Then what? Another national threat?"

From his expression, I can tell my remark has struck something. I have a feeling I'm close to figuring out what's going on with him, and go through what I have. It seems to concern him personally. Vanishing for weeks with an obviously false, after-the-fact explanation. Then there's that half-healed gunshot wound that threw me off more than anything else. Strange behaviour, running off on scene. Maniacally saving lives. Saying you could call it debts. And people just dropping lawsuits against him once he "talks" to them.

Damn. He can't have mafia connections, can he?

And if he doesn't, what about his very powerful and wealthy Italian family?

I cast him a sidelong glance, and decide that a lot of things would make sense there.

But those accidents? I defended him when Hannah thought he arranged them, and I still refuse to think he staged them in any way. I just can't believe my knowledge of human nature is so far off. If my wild guess is even remotely correct, he could be one of those Hollywoodesque types trying to live their lives outside the family connections. Thinking about it, it sounds like a great idea. They make for a cool cast, too, I think to myself as I go through the ones I know. The conscientious younger sibling, the power-hungry politician, and his mother, whom I've met once, would make a great Godmother. I can just see that little, immaculate old lady scheming and plotting for world dominion, or worse. I might work on a movie script on my days off, and try to get Martin Scorsese to direct.

He doesn't answer my question, and there's no way I'm going to tell him what's on my mind. Before the silence gets awkward, we get a call for a fall in Tribeca.

It's an elderly woman, who stumbled inside her (locked) apartment. Dispatch tells us the address, and also informs us she is on the kitchen floor and can't get up, but there's a key in the flower pot next to her door.

We arrive with our bags, monitor, oxygen unit and the stretcher, but there's neither a flower pot nor a key. We've already found out that the manager isn't in his office, and the neighbours don't have a key.

"Ma'am," Peter shouts through the door. "There is no key. We'll have to break the door open."

There's no reply from the inside, and we exchange a worried glance.

"Go ahead," I say, and he puts his foot to the door and tries to break it open. I saw him kick in a door about a month ago, which I was pretty sure I couldn't have moved, but today, nothing happens.

He tries again, then stands back to let me have a go at it, but it's a very effectively locked and barred door.

We've already called the cops, but before they arrive, the manager appears – apparently, the magic word to make him come out is "Two guys in paramedic uniforms are trying to break open a door," rather than "One of the occupants has broken her hip."

The manager lets us in, eyeing the dent in the door left by Peter's boot – or maybe mine – and we can finally get through to the woman in the kitchen. Her hip is indeed broken, and we get her on the board on the stretcher and give her five milligrams of morphine on the spot, then call for orders of an additional five milligrams two minutes later. I let Peter tech. I've met my match in calming down elderly old ladies in distress. But in this case, her distress is as real as it's justified – she was lying on the kitchen floor with her hip broken for close to half an hour, after all.

When we've dropped her off, I can tell it bothers Peter that we weren't able to break open the door, and get to her faster.

"Doors aren't meant to be kicked in," I remind him. "And for some reason that's completely beyond me, we're still not issued crowbars."

He gives a short laugh and finishes his run report.

I wonder if he's thinking back to that other door he managed to kick in, and why it didn't work this time.

It's a busy day. We run six more calls – an anaphylactic reaction, chest pain, a maternity call, a minor stabbing, and two MVAs – and somewhere between two run forms, I remember that I didn't even ask why the junior New York senator crashed into his younger brother's paramedic preception.

"What did your brother want, by the way?" I ask Peter.

Peter shrugs. "Family trouble. Nothing too serious, I think."

He's got his eyes on his run form, so he doesn't see me raise my eyebrows.

Family, huh.

.

.

.

.

* * *

* I know that Peter has been a paramedic on the show since _Fugitives_, but I always felt that made the transition from nurse to paramedic a bit too easy. It _is_ easier than going from paramedic to nurse, but I still don't think they'd just give him a patch immediately because he was so good-looking. ;)

In addition, it made perfect sense with a tiny scene in "Acceptance": When Nathan comes to talk to Peter about Kelly Houston, Peter looks very stressed out, and there's an extremely gruff-looking paramedic behind Nathan who clearly dislikes it when Peter goes to talk with his brother. Well, that's obviously Gerald.


	19. Human connections, September 2007

**Human connections**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 12 September, 2007, 11:04 PM

When I arrive at the ambulance bay on Tuesday morning at ten to eight, Peter isn't there. Neither is Two Victor.

I look into the EMT room, where Karen O'Neill and Nick Greentree are sitting over some cold beverages (wonder where they got them), but no Peter.

"Hi-ho, Prince of Persia," Nick calls me as he sees me looking around. "Lost something?"

"Knock it off, Queen of the night shift," I reply. Karen almost snorts up the contents of her bottle. "You haven't seen Peter?"

"Not again?" Nick says, in a threatening voice, doubtlessly remembering the time when he had to cover for a mysteriously disappeared Peter last June.

"It's still eight minutes," Karen says with a look at the clock on the wall.

I go out to see whether our rig has come in yet, but it hasn't, so I join Nick and Karen in the EMT room.

After five minutes, Vasquez comes in, looking disgruntled. "Peter just called in," he says. "He'll be here in half an hour. Hesam, Two Victor is still out on a call. Do a checkup as soon as it's in, OK?"

I nod, and Vasquez leaves.

"Has Peter ever been late?" Nick asks. "I mean, dropping off the face of the earth for weeks, sure, but being _half an hour_ late?" He shakes his head. "What's the world coming to?"

I go out at twenty past eight to restock Two Victor, and when I come back, Peter is just coming in as well. He looks like he's run most of the distance.

"What happened?" I ask him, perplexed.

"I… got stuck in a traffic jam."

"Don't you usually take the Subway?"

"It was late."

"Half an hour late?"

"Well, that was the traffic jam, not the Subway," he says, irritated. "Does the soda machine work again?" he changes the topic, with a look at the bottle in Karen's hand.

Karen shakes her head. "No, I got it from the gas station three blocks away."

"That Coke?" he asks hopefully, cocking his head to look at the label.

"No, a diet Dr Pepper." She holds it out to him, but he withdraws his hand as if stung.

"You can keep it," he says.

"That's why she does it," Nick says, jabbing an accusing finger at Karen, or maybe at her diet Dr Pepper. "I bet she hates the stuff too, she only drinks it because nobody else wants it."

"Yeah, look what you made me do!" Karen replies.

Peter and I prefer to sidle out to our rig, before we have to witness someone getting killed over a diet Dr Pepper.

Peter appears dejected, but since he doesn't offer anything, I don't ask. I wait for him to get himself a bottle of water from the cafeteria – everything else they've got there is hopelessly overpriced, and don't even think we get anything for free – and we clear. The first call comes in a quarter hour later.

"Two Victor, 81st/Madison for a man not breathing."

"Two Vicky, ten-four." I hit the lights and sirens, and as I pull out, I see Peter flinching and staring up. I laugh out loud.

"Hey, Peter, that's the siren, remember? Peter – siren; siren – Peter."

His laugh sounds put on. He doesn't look up anymore, but I can tell he has to force himself not to.

When we arrive at our assignment, there's no patient. Dispatch tells us that they were called by a bystander who saw a man collapsed on the street, but the bystander didn't give his number.

We wait for a couple of minutes, ask a few people if they saw anything, check back with dispatch, and they tell us to cancel it.

We sit in the truck, and a couple of young girls chat with us. There's nothing like the uniform of a paramedic to attract female admirers. And, of course, there's nothing like the job of a paramedic to drive them away again once you've started a serious relationship. That's why so many people in the medical profession end up dating other people in the medical profession.

"You ever do mouth to mouth?" one of them asks us, in what has to be number one of flirting openers aimed at paramedics. I can see that hers is aimed at Peter, but he seems distracted by road workers with air hammers. Distracted is an understatement. He's staring at them, but I can't see anything worth staring at. Definitely less worth staring at than the girls at the passenger window, who are rather pretty.

"Not so much," I chime in from the driver's seat when it's plain Peter isn't going to answer the question. "Usually, we've got the much less romantic bag valve masks." I realise that this is going to put an end to any flirting sport, but flirting is not much fun anyway when you have to do it across your completely unresponsive partner.

When they've walked off, I look at Peter. "You OK?"

He shakes himself and looks away from the road workers. "Yeah," he says with a sigh. "Day just started off bad."

"You wanna talk about it?" I ask.

He hesitates for a second, then he says, "I thought about what you told me… to stop closing myself off. So I tried to get my family together. The only possible time was breakfast this morning. Only my brother didn't even bother to show up, and my mom just kept staring at his empty chair and didn't listen to a word I was saying."

"That didn't work out, huh?"

"Nope."

"Hey, I'm sorry, dude. Is that why you were so late today?"

"No, I left for work when I always do. It wasn't the sort of breakfast you try to drag out unnecessarily."

"You know, the Houlihan's-at-midnight offer still stands."

"Thanks, man," he says, with a weak smile.

I'm already thinking about how this might fit into my movie script. If I stick to the Mafia theme, his brother's probably gonna be lying in a ditch somewhere. But, on second thought, that would be a waste of the character.

.

.

.

* * *

Sorry for the long wait, and the short chapter. I plan to push this towards completion now – only seven or so entries to go until the end of the series, and after that, I finally need to push my own, original writing again, which I've neglected for far too long. ;)

Expect updates to be regular, short, and sweet. ;)


	20. Busy, October 2007

**Busy**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 5 October, 2007, 10:38 PM

We're working a double shift on a Thursday morning; tour one and two – midnight to four in the afternoon. The deadest point of that sort of double has to be eight in the morning. A couple of people go off shift, and it dawns on your sleep-deprived brain that you've got another eight hours to go.

Into that deadest point comes a radio call. We've just got ourselves some coffee and are sitting in our ambulance a few blocks away from Mercy Heights.

"Five Adam, 53rd/Lexington Ave for a train accident. On a one."

Peter and I look at each other, and he's quicker than me to reach the mike. "This is Two Victor. We're two blocks out. Show us ten-sixty-three."

"Stand by, Two Victor."

"Switch to Citywide," I tell Peter. Train accident at 53/Lex could be bad.

Sure enough, Citywide is buzzing. All we need to hear is "Ten thirty-two" and "Class Edward", which means a train accident with at least 26 injured. "Go!" Peter says, reaching for the safety belt as I hit the lights and sirens and pull out.

"Two Victor," dispatch comes in again a second later.

"Two Victor," Peter acknowledges.

"Proceed to 53/Lexington. On a one."

"Two Victor, ten-four," Peter replies. The details appear on our screen, but we don't need them – this area is our backyard.

"Class Edward?" Peter says. "Mercy Heights is gonna burst out of the seams."

I don't have time for more than a nod, as we're already on scene.

It _is_ bad. One train has derailed and hit another head-on. Most of it happened in a tunnel, but there are several injured on the platform. People are ushering away from the scene and jostle us on the stairs.

We're the second unit on scene. The first is a basic unit from FDNY, and I brace myself for the inevitable fight for the top dog position. The FDNY EMT opposite me takes one look at my uniform, and another on my round patch, and does the same.

"An FDNY fly car is on the way here," he tells me. You have to hand it to him, he's got authority in his voice. "Get those people away from here. We're currently triaging the wounded."

"What have you got?" I ask, intending to cooperate as long as I'm not being bullshitted, but making no move to get any people away from here. The only people I'm going to get away from here will have to have broken bones.

His eyes narrow. I sense bullshit. "Listen, buddy, we were here first. Someone needs to see to scene safety."

I kneel by one man with blood all over his face, who at first glance looks to be the most seriously wounded. "See this?" I tell the EMT with a short tap on my patch. "Until a supervisor arrives, I'm the senior medic here and in charge of triage." I try to take a pulse but can't find one, and carefully palpate my patient's skull. "Peter!" I yell back at my partner, but am not sure he can hear me over the din.

The EMT is still standing in front of me and trying to show me he's the biggest bully in the playground. "Listen, you guys can't just—" he begins, but I cut across him.

"For Chrissakes, man, if you can't make yourself useful, at least let _me_ do my job here, you hear me?" I get up, nearly colliding with Peter. "This one looks bad. No palpable pulse, could be a skull fracture. Put a collar on him, see if you can get better readings, OK?"

Peter nods, and I'm on to the next.

The EMT has finally decided that standing around yelling at me is a bad idea, and is off to help.

When the supervisor arrives, three more units are on scene, and we're ready to move out the first of the casualties.

I get back to Peter, expecting him to have the first patient boarded and collared, but he's sitting next to a woman clutching her stomach. I can't see the first guy anywhere.

"What are you doing, man?" I ask him incredulously. "Let's move out with our guy!"

"Not necessary," Peter says, pushing hair out of his eyes with the back of his gloved hand. "He's OK."

"He's _OK_?" I echo, almost shouting. "You've gotta be kidding me."

"No, really," Peter says, gesturing back to where, sure enough, my first-triaged patient is sitting, holding a twelve-year-old girl and trying to calm her down. His head is still covered in blood, but he's sitting there talking to the girl. "I don't think the blood was his."

I can hardly believe I felt a skull fracture. I was so sure. Maybe it was all the blood that caused me to think he must have one.

"She's in hypovolaemic shock," Peter now tells me, jerking his head at the woman, who is pale as death. "I think she's got internal bleeding."

"Board her, OK?" I say. "I'll be with you in a second."

I run over to our first patient, and reassess him. I can't find a thing. Still, I'd feel a lot more comfortable leaving him here if I wasn't so dead sure I felt a fracture on his skull seven minutes ago.

I grab an FDNY EMT – a different one than my special friend – and tell him to examine that guy carefully before triaging him out. Then I get back to Peter to carry the woman to our rig.

I let Peter tech; he assessed the woman first, and he seems to take this for granted as well. The ride to the hospital takes us less than five minutes; it would be far less if it wasn't the morning rush hour.

Peter has gotten in two IVs, but he's only running fluid though one of them. "I think she's OK," he says. I stare at the beautiful sinus rhythm with a blood pressure of 120 over 90 on the monitor, as well as her nicely pinked-up face, and have to agree.

We're met by a small army of gowned-up doctors and interns, who listen to our report as they wheel the patient in. I catch a disappointed look behind a green facemask as the doctor behind it finds that the first victim of the day is nothing to write home about. Wait until you get the next dozen, I say to myself. On our way here, Code Edward has been upgraded to Code Frank, meaning fifty-one to seventy-five casualties.

Peter makes quick notes on a run form so we can fill in the rest later, and we're back to the scene again. All three units on duty for Mercy Heights, One William and Seven Henry, plus ourselves, are racing back and forth between the crash site and the hospital, as it's the closest to the scene. Mercy gets as much as it can handle, and then some. The most seriously injured are brought here; others are being distributed to Bellevue and NYU Medical.

By our fourth run, after no more than seventy minutes, no green-clad armies surge towards us as we wheel in another patient. Walking wounded are lining the corridors, some still hoping to be seen by a doctor soon, many having resigned themselves to a long wait. Plastic chairs have been put up along the walls. Nurses, doctors, assistants are milling about. All the trauma rooms are full; some minor surgeries are being performed in the corridors.

I pull open the back door to unload our fourth patient, a black young man with a probable spine injury, and find Peter looking like death warmed over.

"You OK?" I ask, concerned.

"Yeah," he says, out of breath.

"You look exhausted," I state.

"I'm fine. Come on," he says, getting the top end of the stretcher. I cast a look at the monitor. The readings look pretty good to me.

"What have we got?" I ask Peter.

"He's gonna be OK," he says. "He's a little shaken, but… he's gonna be fine."

"That's the fourth patient who wasn't as bad as we thought," I say, amazed. "We've got luck on our side today."

"It's not over yet," Peter murmurs, helping me wheel our patient to a free portion of corridor. We stay with him until he can be seen by a nurse, making reassuring small-talk. I see Peter give a nod across the hall to the deaf file clerk, whose name I've gathered by now is Emma. He's seen her a couple of times over the last few weeks, which has given rise to a couple of "Peter and Emma sitting in a tree" intonations.

Not by me, of course.

Well, not today, at least.

After we've handed our patient over to a nurse, we're off again, and finally, our luck runs out.

FDNY has extricated several badly-injured victims from the train wrecks, and we pick up a teenage boy with spinal injuries as well as fractures to his legs. When we get ready to transport him, Peter nearly collapses. We end up getting an FDNY EMT to drive while I tech and Peter tries to help, but we lose the boy.*

Peter insists he's OK, just tired, and since he doesn't collapse again, I send him for supplies, writing up a couple of run forms. I wait for far longer than it should have taken, and when I go to check, I'm treated to the weirdest sight of the day, which is saying something.

Peter is sitting next to Emma Coolidge on the floor, over a girl in a – I kid you not – pink tutu complete with plastic tiara, after Ms. Coolidge has – I'm still dead serious – performed a thoracostomy on the girl.

In case you're waiting for an explanation now, so am I.

Well, Peter did explain, sort of. He said Emma has a degree in medicine.

But of course. Why didn't I think of it?

We run four more calls, by which time most of the wounded have been recovered. One William and Seven Henry stay on the job; they give us a lunch break at two pm – which has happened approximately twice this year so far – for which we make up with some overtime.

We run into Karen O'Neill at some point, who informs us that there's a CIS debriefing scheduled at six pm. I ask Peter if he's going to go, but he says no. I don't feel like going either. I feel cynical for saying this, but the day has been pretty good. We lost a single life, and saved almost a dozen.

I later hear he's been in the rec room after shift, playing the piano with Emma. Why he would do such a thing – why _she_ would so such a thing – is beyond me, but they seem to think it's a great pastime.

I just hit my pillow.

.

.

.

.

* * *

*See my "Partners and Chauffeurs".

Note: From now on, you'll forgive me if I just send continuity to hell. It's pretty easy to estimate the time that must have elapsed during "Redemption", and it's pretty much a month, give or take a week. Still, I have to start in September (when college starts) and after what feels like no more than two weeks, it needs to be Thanksgiving. I'm sorry. Blame the writers. ;)


	21. Kablooey, November 2007

**Kablooey**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 23 November, 2007, 9:38 PM

The morning after Thanksgiving, I arrive at one minute to eight. We normally get Fridays off, but we swapped the tour with Shannon and Doug of Two Union, who are going to take over our Saturday one. A pretty good deal if you ask me, as we also have the Sunday off, in exchange for the holiday shift. Peter clears us almost before I close the door on my side.

"Sorry, man," I say apologetically. Lately, I've really made an effort to be there about a quarter hour before our start of shift. "Last night was late. You had a good Thanksgiving? You said you weren't sure what you were doing. Did your folks come round after all?"

The look he gives me is very strange. I remember he looked rather off-colour yesterday, too, but the day was so busy that we didn't really get a lot of chances to talk.

"Yeah," he finally says.

"You OK?" I ask. "I thought you looked like you were coming down with something yesterday."

"I guess I am."

I don't ask him if he's fit enough to work. He's here, so he is.

We run three abdominal pains before noon, which has to be a new record for me, even after thanksgiving. The last guy, an immensely obese man of indeterminable age but whose state card says he's forty-two, is being one of the most obnoxious patients poor old Vicky has ever seen.

"You… can't… make… me… walk," he pants, in an extremely close approximation of Stevie from _Malcolm in the Middle_, which quickly brings both Peter's and my patience to breaking point. "I… got… these… terrible… chest pains."

Chest pains was what dispatch gave us, too, but we're both pretty sure this is bullshit. Or rather, his belly is so atrociously huge that he's mistaking it for his chest. His cardiac rhythm is fine, apart from a high blood pressure, which doesn't surprise me in the least.

"I'll get the stair chair," I say to Peter with a sigh. "Let's get him to Vicky."

"Who's… Vicky…?" our patient puffs, with an audible pause even between the last word and the question mark. It's hard to make out, but he moves some of the fat in his face out of the way to form a puzzled expression.

"A venerable but very trusty old lady," I reply. "We parked her just down in the street." In the street is right – I can hear the honking down there.

"Think we should give him a nitro under the tongue, in case it is chest pain?" Peter asks.

I shrug, and nod. "Go for it. And give him a mint _on_ the tongue, while you're at it."

He gives me a puzzled look. (Which looks a lot more genuinely puzzled than our patient's look earlier.) "A what?"

"He'll be easier to carry if he bursts," I say. I hate to ruin my own jokes by having to explain them. Plus this was a pretty good one.

He still stares at me as if he's wondering whether I'm quite right in the head.

"Monty Python?" I say. "After dinner mint? 'Just the one, Monsieur?' Ka-blooey?" Peter has followed me into the hall at this point, out of earshot of our patient.

"Ah, OK," he says, absently.

Definitely coming down with something.

We carry the man down the stairs – luckily, it's only the second floor – and take him to the hospital. A doctor looks at his EKG and puts him into the waiting room. He's seen two hours later and sent home. His heart is fine.

Our last call is for an old lady who fell in her nursing home and broke her wrist. She is whimpering terribly, says the pain is on a scale of eight and a half, ten being the worst pain she's ever felt.

Peter is teching while I drive, and she whimpers all the while as he starts a line, with a twenty-four size paediatric catheter because she is terrified of anything bigger.

"It's OK," I can hear him say soothingly. "It's gonna be all right. I'll give you something for the pain, it'll be better in a minute."

After less than a moment, though, I can hear a loud clattering and clinking noise from the back, followed by Peter cursing.

"Everything all right?" I shout back. That sounded alarmingly like the drug box.

"Yeah… no," he says, followed by some more cursing, none of which sounds fit for an old lady's ears. I take this to mean that neither he nor our patient was hurt, but the clinking probably results from some broken vials, and a completely messed-up drug box.

Peter seems to have caught himself, though, and I hear him talking soothingly to our patient again, whose whimpers subside after a little while longer, which has to mean that there was some morphine left.

"How did that happen?" I ask as I open the back door and help Peter unload our patient, glancing at the open drug box on the bench, which looks a mess, broken glass, drops and puddles of fluid everywhere.

"I slipped," he says. I guess it's the cold he's hatching. I'm pretty sure I wasn't hitting any bumps in the road when it happened.

We make sure the ambulance is locked when we carry our patient inside, with the unsecured drug box lying around. It's twenty minutes past four, and already getting dark outside.

After we've dropped off our patient, who is a lot calmer now, I tell Peter to go home. "I'll handle the rest. It's OK; go home and get some sleep."

"Thanks, man," he says. "But I'll clean up that mess. If you remake the stretcher, I'll sort out the drug box."

"You sure?" I ask. "It's no big deal."

He nods.

We go back to our rig, and he gets the drug box from the bench, starting to walk back inside.

"Seeya on Monday," I say, slapping his hand.

"Take care," he says, and is off.

I remake the stretcher, and take our paperwork inside, to hand it in at the reception desk. Nurse Hammer is there, sifting through the run reports and putting them in a paper tray.

"Peter not with you?" she asks.

"He's cleaning up some drug box accident," I say.

She raises her eyebrows. "I see," she says. "You have a nice evening."

"Thanks," I say, shouldering my bag. "You too."


	22. Bad Day, November 2007

**Bad day**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 26 November, 2007, 7:56 PM

Two glorious days off, and a weekend to boot. I indulge in the luxury of doing nothing at all on Saturday except watching TV and reading the newspaper in between. On Sunday evening, Doug Richards calls, asking if I'll join the guys for dinner. He tells me to ask Peter too. I call his number, but I only get his answering machine. I leave him my cell number, but he doesn't call me back.

I manage to get a decent night's sleep despite a long night out at the Chinese restaurant (helped along by the fact that I'm none too wild about Chinese), and my wakeup song is "Bad Day" by R. E. M., which only improves my mood. Despite the title, it's a great good-mood song. I hit the button on my alarm clock when it's over, so as not to have the good mood dragged down again by the news. Or the Pussycat Dolls.

It's raining, so I take the Subway to work. Across from me sits a young man reading the _Post_. The top flap of the paper is hanging over a bold headline, rendering it almost illegible, but when he shifts it, I can make out the last bits of two lines: "…elli / …ash."

For a moment, I try to make up possible headlines from these – from "Petrelli Promises New Anti-Terror Bash" to "Burning Spirelli: Restaurant Burned To Ash", but when the guy is done with the newspaper and puts it on the seat beside him, I feel like an asshole as I read, upside down, "Senator Petrelli Dies In Plane Crash."

I actually feel my stomach drop. Not as much for my second-least favourite politician, but for Peter.

The man opposite me must have seen the shock on my face. "May I?" I ask, and he shrugs and hands me the front page. There's a photograph of a burning plane wreck in the darkness.

I read,

_As was confirmed around 5 p. m. yesterday,_ _New York Senator Nathan Petrelli, 40, died on Sunday morning around 2.15 a. m. when his plane crashed in a field near Manchester, Connecticut. Petrelli and his pilot were the only people on board. _

_Police spokesman Philip Cole of Hartford Police Department says, "We're still in the early stages of investigation. Currently, the evidence points to an accident. We can almost rule out sabotage."_

_The plane crashed into a field but due to the nightly hour, it took several minutes until the fire department was notified. By the time the fire department arrived, the plane had burned out completely. For both the pilot and Senator Petrelli, there was no chance of survival. Early forensic examination suggests both were dead instantly._

_Nathan Petrelli was on his way back from a short vacation, confirms his aide, Elizabeth Fairbanks, from his office in Washington, D. C. He had only recently been appointed Senator after the premature death of his predecessor, Gerald Dickinson. This is the fourth time in two years that tragedy strikes the Petrelli family, after the senator's father, Arthur Petrelli, died in April 2006, followed by a suicide attempt by his younger brother Peter (27) a year ago, and an assassination attempt at a press conference this April, which Nathan Petrelli barely survived._

_Nathan Petrelli leaves behind his divorced wife, and their two young sons. (Continued on page 3.)_

And that's saying nothing about the totally devastated brother he leaves behind.

I thank the guy and hand back his newspaper. I'm dazed. I never knew there'd been that many tragedies in the Petrelli family in the recent past. And _Peter_ tried to commit _suicide_? I always thought I knew him pretty well. Now I feel infinitely stupid and inattentive. I even called him up yesterday about Chinese food. I tell myself I couldn't have known, but that doesn't help.

I arrive at Mercy Heights at a quarter to eight. Jackson greets me with a sombre expression. "Have you heard about…" he begins as he hands me the ambulance keys.

"Yes."

He nods. "Peter's off work for three days. He sounded pretty normal on the phone, but… well. You know."

It's my time to nod. Peter would sound perfectly normal in a situation like this. Rather clipped, probably, but otherwise completely normal. Except he's not.

"I got Nicholas to cover for Peter," Jackson goes on. "He should be here any minute."

I nod again, and head off to the ambulance bay to do the checkup. Nick arrives a few minutes later. He refrains from his usual wise-assery, and we clear at five to eight.

The day is busy. Rain means many falls, broken ankles and wrists, and several minor MVAs. We work two of them before the day is over, and a bad one with two casualties. We get one of them, a thirty-year-old man with serious injuries. He codes on us as we rush him to the hospital, we don't get him back. We hang around in the ED while they work him for half an hour before calling him.

"You think he could have been saved if EMS had been called sooner?" Nick asks suddenly. It takes me a minute to realise he's not talking about our patient.

"Unlikely," I say. "In a plane crash? In a fire? How many people survive plane crashes?"

We write up our paperwork in silence.

"You gonna call Peter?" Nick asks after a while.

That's the question I've been asking myself all day. We see death every day in this job. He's even worked as a hospice nurse, and I've seen him struggling with the deaths of people he's never met until half an hour before. I can't imagine what losing a brother must be like for him.

"I don't know," I say.

"Did you read that about attempted suicide?" he asks.

"Yeah. Never thought he'd ever do anything like that."

"I think Hannah once talked about that, but that was ages ago. It must have been in the paper back then."

I roll my eyes. Hannah. Still, it worries me. I probably wouldn't answer my phone either if my brother had just died, but this is disconcerting news.

The rain has let up when our shift ends. I get some work done at home – bills that have begun to pile up, and dishes that are already in a progressed stage of piling up – and finally pick up the phone at around eight. I get his answering machine again.

"It's Hesam," I say. "Peter… I'm sorry. I feel like an idiot for calling you yesterday. Look, I… I'm really sorry." I pause. "See you later this week. Hey, we're all there to help. If you want help." I hesitate for a moment, then I hang up the phone.


	23. De mortuis nil nisi bene, November 2007

**De mortuis nil nisi bene**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 27 November, 2007, 10:14 PM

I'm at the hospital early on Tuesday morning, as I don't know yet who I'll be working with for the day, and you never know if my temporary partner is even sloppier than me when it comes to being at work on time.

In the ambulance bay, I run into Hannah Davies, who rather surprises me by being sympathetic.

"It's terrible, isn't it?" she says as she sees me.

I nod.

"I mean, he wasn't my favourite person in the world, but I'm _so_ sorry for Peter."

I give another noncommittal nod. It bothers me that Hannah is sporting her compassion cap while I can't contribute a lot.

The longer I think about it, her sudden kindness for her favourite gossip object is not that surprising. Hannah is a stock-emotionalist. When something is outrageous, she is outraged. When something requires sympathy, she opens her internal sympathy drawer.

"You read the paper yesterday?" she asks.

"Yeah," I say. I can't admit to her that it was the _Post_.

"With that bit about his suicide attempt?"

Oh no. Please get me away from here. I haven't done the checkup yet, so I can't even pretend I have to clear.

"I transported him."

She has my attention now. "You what?"

"It was really early in the morning. He'd tried to throw himself off a high-rise building. I probably wouldn't have remembered him if I hadn't recognised his brother – he was on every wall at the time. He was ever so worried. I really liked him for that. Got him my vote too. He was totally shaken, said his brother had tried to kill himself. Peter probably won't remember; Jack was teching and anyway, he was unconscious. Had a concussion and a broken collarbone, I think it was."

I stare at her. "How the hell did he survive a fall from a high-rise building with nothing but a concussion and a broken collarbone?"

"His brother said he'd landed on a fire escape. They were on the ground when we picked him up. Jack nearly ripped off Nathan Petrelli's head for carrying him down from there. But he was still really lucky. But well, that was my brush with Nathan Petrelli." She actually sniffs. "I never told Peter."

It makes me sick to think Hannah runs around basking in having transported an unsuspecting and suicidal Peter. I make a mental note to break it to him gently sometime. If it was me, I'd probably dive off the nearest building straight away.

"That's really considerate of you, not telling anybody," I say. Sarcasm, how sweet is thy taste.

"Well," she says, managing to look abashed. "I sort of did tell a couple of people."

I go through several possible replies and decide to swallow them all. I probably won't be needing any lunch today.

"I'm worried about him though," Hannah says. "What if he tries to kill himself again?"

"I've never tried to kill myself."

Both Hannah and I jump like school kids caught smoking in the bathroom. Peter is in his paramedic uniform, his bag over his shoulder, looking almost the same as ever, except he looks worn and there are circles under his eyes. He's also got a split lip, as if he got himself into a fight several days ago. He's come up behind Two Victor, and I wonder how much of our conversation he heard. I find myself wishing he heard my sarcastic remark, so he doesn't think I was gossiping with Hannah. But what the hell, I was.

"Have you checked the truck?" he asks me. Clipped.

"No," I have to confess.

"I'll do it," he says, and I hand him the key. He gets inside, and I leave Hannah and join Peter in the back of the ambulance.

"What are you doing here?" I ask him in what I hope comes across as a concerned if slightly reproachful tone. "Jackson said you had taken three days off."

"Yeah. But I couldn't sit around at home with nothing to do."

"Hey man… I'm so sorry. If there's anything—"

"Yeah, thanks for your call," he says. "Can you check the gas, please?"

I take the hint and check the gas.

* * *

The shift with Peter is _almost_ normal. He's never been the most talkative person in the world, so at times, I can pretend it's any normal tour with him, particularly while we're busy working calls. I let him tech, and he's as focused as ever; but whenever there is a pause, and there are several long ones that day, the things that are left unsaid are so tangible that they're like a third person in the cockpit.

Towards the end of our shift, we're called for an unresponsive person on Whitehall Street. In a small but well-kept apartment, we find a distraught mother and her fourteen-year-old daughter, who is passed out on the couch, a half-empty bottle of some alcopop beside her, and a completely empty bottle of Nembutal. The mother keeps sobbing over a suicide note that was on the table next to the empty bottle.

"How long was she alone?" Peter asks as he gently lays the girl on the floor, checking her respiration and taking her pulse while I put her on the monitor. She didn't react to ammonia inhalants and sternal rubs, but she has a pulse.

"At least two hours – oh my God, oh my God, please make her come back—"

"She's got respirations of three," Peter tells me. "Give me the ambu-bag, let's intubate and be out of here."

"Will she be OK?" the mother wails.

"She's got a chance," Peter tells her as he breathes the girl with the ambu-bag while I get out the laryngoscope and attach a size three Miller blade.

"Shall I?" I ask.

Peter hesitates for a fraction of a second, then he takes the scope from me and says, "I'll do it."

I sit down with him, ready to take over. Since his preception, he's passed four or five tubes, but he had trouble with two of them. He crouches at the girl's head, and goes in with the laryngoscope.

He withdraws it after thirty seconds. "Bag," he tells me in a tight voice as he gets out a smaller blade and attaches it to the laryngoscope.

"Need some cricoid pressure?" I ask.

He gives a curt nod as he goes in again. I feel for the cricoid cartilage on the girl's throat and gently press down on them, and can see Peter's relief as the manoeuvre brings the vocal cords into view. A few seconds later, I can feel the tube pass under my fingers.

"OK," he nods at me to bag. He listens to the girl's lungs, and nods at me again. Our patient's colour improves immediately.

The girl's blood pressure is still extremely low, so we decide to start a line right now, instead of carrying her down five sets of stairs and getting her into the ambulance first.

I continue bagging while Peter goes for a vein in the girl's AC. I can hear him murmur a curse as he blows the vein. When I look over, I can see his hands are shaking.

I push the ambu-bag into his hands, and try for a vein in the other arm. I have to dig around before I get one. Peter keeps bagging while I get a bag of saline running.

"You OK?" I ask as we carry the girl out, while the mother has gone in search of her state card.

He gives another jerky nod, but looks calm enough once again. Since we've got the tube and IV in place, I let him tech while I drive. He manages to calm down the upset mother during the ride, who tells him the girl was being bullied at school. Our patient's oxygen levels look fine, and her blood pressure is back up at 85 over 65 as we arrive at the New York Downtown Hospital. The girl is seen right away; after we've handed her over, Peter remakes the stretcher and restocks while I write up the paperwork. When I come back to the truck, he's sitting in his seat, staring off into space, his mouth a very thin line. He doesn't react at all when I get into the driver's seat. After a while, he starts, and catches me watching him.

"You're thinking about what Hannah told you this morning," he states. His voice sounds hoarse.

"Among other things," I say.

"Look, I never tried to kill myself. Nathan—" he catches on the word, but draws a deep breath and goes on, "was lying."

I'm dying to know what the truth was, what would make Peter jump from a high-rise building if not to kill himself, or why Nathan Petrelli was lying. But there's no way I can ask him.

_Of the dead, speak no evil_.


	24. Friggin' haemorrhaging, December 2007

**Friggin' haemorrhaging, man**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 8 December, 2007, 11:26 AM

Peter is off work again about a week later, for his brother's funeral. I work the evening shift with Bernard.

"You don't get to see that much of the guy, right?" Bernard says as I join him in the ambulance bay. I remember that the last time I worked with him, he was covering for Peter, last July. And he broke his ankle in the process.

"Whatever you can say about the past, this is hardly his fault, is it?" I reply.

They're showing footage of the funeral on the evening news. Nathan Petrelli gets a full state funeral including a missing man formation. They're showing his mother receiving the flag, and I can see Peter, as well as a lot of Washington brass. I don't envy him any of this.

We're working a minor MVA at a quarter past seven when we hear Citywide going off with calls. Office shooting at 1583 W Hudson, several casualties. Bernard curses; I can see he's eager to be where the action is, but we're stuck on this call.

When we clear at a quarter to eight, Bernard gets his wish; dispatch sends us to the shooting. We arrive at a scene that's pretty well organised for all its chaos; there's a supervisor there, and all the casualties have been triages, some are being treated on scene, but they need more ambulances to get them to the nearest hospitals. St. Vincent's has taken the most serious cases, and most of the others are walking wounded. We gather that a guy who had just been fired took out his anger at the office at large, killing two people and wounding another sixteen. We're surprised to hear he's still alive, after being taken down.

There are about a dozen EMS personnel milling around at the site, seeing to the wounded while they wait for more cars. A lot of them are from St. Vincent's, most of the others are FDNY. We report to the supervisor, who gives us a young man who was grazed by a bullet on his upper arm, to be taken to the New York Downtown. It's a pretty long drive. The guy is agitated and suffers from stress reaction, but he calms down after five milligrams of morphine, and gets rather talkative. He says his name is Andrew.

"Man, that was like hell in there," he tells me, his eyes wide. "I was doin' overtime, wouldn't even be there at that time normally, and in comes Adam and just starts yelling…"

"Adam? Was that the shooter?" I ask, putting a fresh 4x4 compress on the man's arm and dressing the wound. It's still seeping some, but has mostly stopped bleeding.

"Yeah. He got the sack this week, and just started firing. I guess he thought the ones that still worked there didn't deserve to."

"That sounds like the way he'd think, yeah," I agree. "But the police got him?"

"Not the police, no," Andrew says. "There was this guy – I was hiding behind my cubicle wall so I didn't see him, didn't recognise his voice either – who tried to talk sense into him. Said something about how he understood how angry he was and everything. I don't know what happened – there was another shot, but then people said Adam was down. That was before the police arrived. I saw Adam when they helped me out. He wasn't shot, but there was blood everywhere. I bet he killed the poor fellow."

I shake my head, and gently pat him on the forearm. "Don't think about him, OK? You'll be all right. You got family?"

"Yeah, my wife, and two daughters." He grins feebly.

"There. Called them up already?"

"Yeah, right after it was over."

"Chances are you'll be home again by tomorrow at the latest. They'll probably want to keep you at the hospital overnight, but I don't think you'll have to endure more than one or two hospital meals. And the breakfast is usually OK. It's the lunch you need to be careful with."

He gives a shaky laugh.

Bernard helps me unload the patient, and I write up the run form while he restocks and remakes the stretcher.

"Man," he tells me, chuckling, as he returns to the nurses' station. "Some people."

I raise an eyebrow at him as I write.

"I just ran into two medics at the supply room. One of them kept berating the other for letting a patient get away. It was like watching Punch and Judy."

I make a quizzical noise. "Can't have been too badly injured then," I say.

"Apparently, he was! In the words of one of those guys, 'Friggin' haemorrhaging, man! Friggin' haemorrhaging!'" He chuckles.

I shake my head. "I'll probably end up buying a newspaper tomorrow."

We continue doing 911 calls after clearing. They don't need any more help at the site. Our last call is for an unknown in the Lower East Side, who turns out to be a faker with alcohol on his breath. Here are severl people gathered around him, in front of a bar. He's on the floor, pretending to be out cold, but tries to avert the ammonia inhalants I crush under his nose, and when Bernard proceeds to administer the hand test, picking up the guy's hand and letting it drop over his face, his hand drops beside his head, a sure sign he's awake.

"He done fell down when this guy punch him," one of the bystanders offers. "It din' look like he was hurt bad." "This guy" of course being no longer anywhere near.

"Buddy, quit wasting our time," I tell the man on the ground, angrily. "You're not unconscious. If you think you're hurt, tell us what happened."

"He done punch me in the stomach!" our "unresponsive" yells. "I'm bleeding, man!"

We assess him, cutting his shirt with some satisfaction while he protests. We don't find anything. His pressure, respiration and heart rate are all perfectly normal. Still, as he won't sign a refusal, we have to transport him, again to the New York Downtown.

"Be careful, man!" he shouts at Bernard as we get him inside our rig. "I'm bleeding!"

"Friggin' haemorrhaging, man, friggin' haemorrhaging!" Bernard says with a wink at me, shaking with laughter.

We punch out at half past midnight. But at least Bernard was enjoying himself.


	25. A nice little MI, December 2007

**A nice little MI**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 12 December, 2007, 2:42 PM

When I come to the ambulance bay the next day, our rig is there, but the back doors are closed. It's a quarter to eight, and I wonder if I actually managed to beat Peter to work for once.

I walk past Vicky to go into the supervisor's office, but cast a look into the cockpit – and am surprised to see Peter there, reading his copy of _Pocket Reference For ALS Providers. _He hasn't seen me yet.

"Hey," I say, knocking at the side window.

He looks up, looking tired and worn. "Hey."

"How long've you been here?" I realise I sound accusing, and wish I could just eat my words.

He shrugs. "Half an hour. The bus is restocked, we're good to go."

I nod, trying to think of something consoling to say. But then I realise that the only consolation he needs right now is work. A demanding call or two, a day without a lunch break, eight hours straight that leave him with no time to dwell on anything but catheter sizes, epinephrine doses and insurance card numbers.

Before we clear, Supervisor Vasquez comes into the ambulance bay.

"Two Queen in yet?" he asks.

"Haven't seen 'em yet," I reply.

Vasquez stops by the passenger window. "Hey," he says to Peter, groping for the right words. "Sorry about your loss."

Peter gives a jerky nod. Vasquez hesitates for a few seconds, then he knocks on the side door by way of good-bye, and leaves.

I can see Peter's jaw working, and I realise that I have to find something to say this time.

"Well, let's get ourselves a nice little MI, right?" I ask.

Peter turns to look at me, and for half a second, I fear I stepped way out of line. Then he bursts out laughing, laughs far longer than the feeble joke warranted, even wiping his eyes when he finally calms down.

"They ought to put that on condolence cards," he finally manages. "God, this so beats 'sorry about your loss.'"

I grin as I clear us. If I wasn't dead sure that nobody but Peter would ever find that helpful, I'd think I'd uncovered the secret of the ages in coping with loss.

We find ourselves a cosy little spot in Tudor City, opposite a baker's shop. As my stomach gives a noticeable growl, Peter gives me a glance under raised eyebrows.

"So that's how you were at the hospital so early?" he asks.

I grin sheepishly. "I'll get us some breakfast. You want something too?"

I can tell he's about to say he isn't hungry, but he seems to consider it good manners to reply, "Yeah, thanks."

I return to our rig five minutes later, with a bag of cinnamon rolls, two paper cups of coffee, and a newspaper under my arm.

Peter gives me a sceptical look as he takes the coffee from me. "You realise that, by Murphy's Law, all that stuff means we won't get any break at all until four p. m.?"

"I just remembered that office shooting yesterday. You heard about that?"

"Uh, yeah," he says, absently scratching his chest. "Heard it on the… radio."

"I was there," I go on. "Bernard and I got there late, we weren't among the first to respond, but at least we got our share of the war story."

Peter continues to look at me across the lid of his coffee cup.

"We transported a guy shot in the arm," I continue. "Apparently, there was a guy who'd just been fired, and took it out on his former workmates. Another guy tried to talk him down, but our patient didn't know what happened to him."

I've found the coverage of the story, and skim the article. "Now that's weird," I say.

"Huh?" Peter asks, still across his coffee.

"Apparently, nobody knows what became of the guy. A few said he was shot down, but he didn't end up in any of the hospitals."

Peter doesn't answer.

"But _I_ know what became of him," I say, triumphantly.

Peter gives me a stare. "You do?"

"Yes. He got himself shot, but, obviously, that didn't stop him from just flying away. I even know who it was."

Peter keeps staring at me.

"Supermaaaaaaan!"

Again, Peter laughs so hard that I feel rather flattered.

* * *

We get very few breaks before four PM, and few chances for a laugh.

At half past one, we're in a shopping mall for a woman collapsed on a bench. Peter notices her bracelet that says she's a diabetic, gets a line, and gives her dextrose, which wakes her up almost immediately. As she's still very shaky, we transport her nonetheless. We're at the nurses' station at Bellevue filling in our run report. A radio is playing Christmas music.

_Christmas Eve will find me_

_Where the love-light gleams_

_I'll be home for Christmas_

_If only in my dreams._

"I got to get out of here," I hear Peter murmur, and he stomps off to the emergency entrance, where our bus is parked.

At ten to three, we get a call for chest pain. Peter hits the lights and sirens, and five minutes later, we pull up in front of an apartment complex in the East Village.

A fifty-three year old man sits in an armchair. He's pale and diaphoretic, breathing fast. I put him on the monitor as Peter assesses him and tries to get a medical history from his wife. She's frightened, but says he's never had an MI before, and doesn't take any regular meds.

Peter has already given the man a baby aspirin by the time the monitor shows elevated ST segments, a clear sign of a myocardial infarction. Our patient is grunting with pain, the wife stares at us, her eyes wide.

"Get a line," I tell Peter. "Hold up on the nitro."

He gives me a puzzled look, but instead of an explanation, I turn to the woman. "You got his insurance card?" I ask her.

He nods, and hustles out into the hall. I follow her.

"He wasn't taking any… meds at all?" I ask her again.

She bursts into tears. "We got them from a friend," she sobs. "Is it because of them that he…?"

"No," I reassure her as I look at the blister pack she shows me, surreptitiously, in which two pale blue lozenges are left. "But I'm glad you told me."

I get back into the living-room, where Peter has gotten a line, and is running a bag of saline. I put our patient on oxygen.

"How you doing, sir?" I ask him. "Any better?"

"A bit," he pants.

"Nitro?" Peter asks again. He clearly hasn't heard of the interactions between nitroglycerine and Viagra.

"Possible adverse effects because of sildenafil citrate," I say, shaking my head. I can see by his expression that Peter still has no idea what I'm talking about. Bless 'im.

We get our patient to the truck, and transport him to Mercy Heights, where we wheel him into the cardiac room. I pat the wife's hand, wish them good luck, and walk out again to where Peter is remaking the stretcher.

"Care to explain?" he says, looking slightly annoyed.

"Sorry," I say, grinning. "But there was something our horny old friend there wasn't telling us, and with that much Viagra in him, nitro would have made his blood pressure crash."

He stares at me. "How the hell did you know that?"

"I've seen it before. The guy not telling you, and the wife embarrassed out of her mind. The last time, I didn't know about the drug interaction, gave nitro, and lost the patient."

"Well," he murmurs. "What a nice little MI."

We get permission to head in after this call. I wish him a nice day off, but I can tell he's not looking forward to it.


	26. Kinda lost count, January 2008

**Kinda lost count**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 5 January, 2008, 09:03 PM

On Friday, my sister calls me and suggests a late lunch at Diego's. I haven't seen her in a few weeks, but the prospect of meeting her boyfriend makes me uneasy. It's not that Frank is a bad person, but he can be a terrible dickhead and seems to have made it his life's ambition to get me into medical school. Naturally, my first impulse is to find myself some moral support, and think of Peter – he might even appreciate me saving him from his day off.

But when I call his number, I get his answering machine again. That might mean he actually found himself something to do. I doubt he's sitting at home eyeing the telephone.

Which is nice for him, but worse for me, as I have to endure Frank for the duration of a few hours.

It turns out I don't have to endure Frank, at least not undiluted. Amina has brought two more friends, who are very keen on me sharing stories on my life as a paramedic, to which Frank can't object given the opposition. Yesterday's Viagra story and office shooting make for a nice opener, and Frodo of the eight and a half fingers, from this year's Independence Day, is already a classic.

We hang out until after five p.m., and walking home, I briefly consider going to Central Park. No idea why. I then decide it's already too late to go all the way over to Manhattan, and head home instead. On the way, there's a slight tremor, as if from an earthquake. Everyone around me stares, a few people run from their houses, looking around, but that's all there is.

Watching the news, I'm glad I didn't go to Central Park.

As disturbing as the footage is, of people running everywhere as the ground shakes under them, what causes me to stare much more is the picture of a man they show later on, arrested by the cops, followed by a larger photograph of him.

"William Hooper?" I say aloud.

The caption under his photo says "Samuel Sullivan", but I'm dead sure it's the guy who was going to sue Peter two months ago. They show him opening chasms in the ground before him.

They give a short back story of Sullivan – he grew up in New York before he and his brother founded a carnival. They show his birth house, near Central Park, which was inexplicably destroyed by a sinkhole two months ago, killing four people and injuring another six.

Sinkhole.

There's the footage of the destroyed house, FDNY trucks everywhere; sure enough, there's Vicky.

As they show images of the carnival, I see the "Sullivan Bros. Carnival" logo in several places. I've seen that one before, too. The last time on Peter's right forearm. I first noticed it on the night of the aforementioned sinkhole, after he had spoken to William Hooper.

It doesn't end there.

Disbelieving, I watch as they show a girl of around eighteen climbing up a Ferris wheel, the cameras on her (where the hell is EMS?) and throwing herself down from a height of sixty feet.

Gets up, pulls out her dislocated shoulder back into place, and states that her name is Claire Bennet, and she'd kinda lost count on how often she'd done this.

As the camera shows the stunned onlookers, I recognise a man, a tall guy in his forties that I last saw with stab wounds to the stomach.

Bennet.

Claire.

Peter got a phone call from someone named Claire, the day before he vanished for weeks. I remember him standing at the crash site, the day I had to bodily pull him away from an MVA victim, then just vanishing after answering his phone, and not reappearing until mid-July.

I sit staring at the TV as they show some background stories. Claire Bennet, assaulted in 2006 at her school homecoming, where another girl was killed. The killer was never caught; a hospice nurse from New York City had been under suspicion but then released.

Hospice nurse.

Bloody. Fucking. _Hell_.

All the strange things happening over the past six months. The things that made me think of Mafia movies, while my Superman or alien abduction remarks might actually have been a lot closer.

I spend the rest of the evening making notes of things I'm going to ask Peter about the next time I see him.

Patients with skull fractures healing. Peter suddenly disappearing and reappearing somewhere else within no time at all. Clam chowder from Boston. Carrying patients of two hundred pounds and over with apparent ease. Throwing himself off rooftops without serious injuries. Seeing things only he could see, like when he was staring at sirens and air hammers. All those times when it was plain he'd got into fights.

As my list gets longer and longer, the question I keep asking myself is: Who in this mess are the good guys, and who are the bad?


	27. One of Us, One of Them, January 2008

**One of Us, one of Them**

Posted by nycmedic059 on 9 January, 2008, 10:28 PM

Walking into the ambulance bay for our next double shift feels strangely like entering the classroom for an exam. Only that I'm the examiner, and the examinee has no idea he's going to be examined shortly.

Peter's in the back of the ambulance, going through the checklist, greeting me as normally as ever. My greeting is more held back, and I can tell that he's noticed. It occurs to me that this is a strange reversal of our usual routine, too. Most of the time, _I_ arrive at work to find _him_ dejected, or beaten up, or vanished, and I'm the one wondering what's up.

"Everything OK?" he asks, which is my line as well. I can now discern the slightest amount of … _something_ in his behaviour. Something that's closest to worry, or suspicion. At this, I feel a certain amount of relief. Relief that there definitely is something he's been hiding all these months, and that I'm not going to make a fool of myself when I accuse him of witchcraft. Thinking about it, this makes for a nice Shakespearean scene. I should have buckled on my fake hunchback.

"I saw the news last night," I say by way of an answer. He tenses, but then forces himself to relax, obviously determined to pretend everything is completely normal.

"That was some luck, huh?" he says lightly. "Almost a miracle that nobody was seriously injured."

"Yeah," I say, "especially that girl who dived off the Ferris wheel."

He doesn't answer.

"But I daresay you've got quite some experience with miracles," I go on, relentlessly. "And I bet she has too, after surviving that attack at her High School. Lucky thing that hospice nurse from New York got off, right?"

Peter looks seriously dismayed now, his jaw working.

"You worked all that out, huh?" he finally says.

I sigh. "Peter, I've known for ages that you have your secrets. I've always felt you had a right to them. But please do me a favour, and don't insult my intelligence."

He doesn't answer, staring just slightly past me, his jaw still working so hard I'm starting to fear he's going to bite off his tongue.

I wait a while longer, then I prompt, "So?"

He finally looks at me. "I'm trying to figure out where to start," he says. "The thing is… I've never had to explain this to anyone. So far, people either knew or didn't have a clue at all."

I raise an eyebrow. "That's kind of insulting to… the collective intelligence on this planet?"

He blinks a few times, and doesn't answer.

"So, what's going on?" I finally ask, now sure I am definitely not making a fool of myself. "Is this _X-Files_, _X-Men,_ or _Radioactive Man_?"

Peter gives a feeble laugh, and finally clears us. "I guess it's a bit of everything," he says, and sighs. "We… that is… there are people who can… do things. All sorts of things. You saw Claire healing. You saw what Samuel Sullivan can do. And there are others."

"How many others?" I ask, fascination replacing my inquisitive stance.

He hesitates. "A lot," he replies. "I don't know how many. I've only known it since last year too. Most of us are… pretty good at hiding their abilities."

"Meaning they don't run around flaunting them the way you do?" I ask.

A look of shock crosses his face. "I flaunt them?" he says.

I snigger. "That clam chowder was pretty much in my face," I say. "Even though it ended up on my pants. So – what sort of 'stuff' is it that you do?"

Before he can answer, dispatch calls our number. I have already forgotten we're on duty. It feels like a commercial break in a movie.

"Stay tuned," I murmur as I acknowledge, hitting the lights and sirens for an MVA two blocks away.

We bring in a man in his thirties with a broken leg and lacerations to his face and upper body. Peter techs, and any further talk about superpowers is out of the question until our first real breather at half past one. Peter has gotten out to get us sandwiches from a street vendor, and I can't help but think that he takes an awfully long time in doing so.

When he has finally returned and is halfway through with his lunch, I ask, "No clam chowder today?"

He casts me a rueful glance. "I don't have that ability anymore."

That takes me somewhat by surprise. "What, they use themselves up?"

He sighs. "For other people, they don't. They've got one ability, and it stays more or less the same. I take over other people's abilities. I can take them by touching someone. But I lose my last one whenever I take another."

"So," I say, very slowly, my mental list of oddities flashing past, "That's why I couldn't find a pattern? What's it been – getting places very fast, super strength, and healing?"

"You noticed all that?" he asks, sounding abashed.

I raise my eyebrows at him.

"I'm sorry, man," he says. "I never meant to insult your intelligence."

"You'd have a hard time to," I reply graciously. "Why didn't you keep it? The healing power?"

"You said it yourself, didn't you?" Peter answers. "A paramedic with a healing power could never work. I overused it, and there will always be people you can't save." He stares ahead. "And then I lost it, and the boy I got it from is dead now."

We're silent for a while, until I remember something else that puzzled me, a while ago. "And all those times you got into fights?" I ask. "That gunshot wound?"

"That's… kind of hard to explain," he says, absently folding the paper handle of his coffee cup, back and forth, back and forth. "I've fought other people with powers… and I've been on the run from people _without_ powers persecuting people _with_ powers." He looks up at me. "That probably doesn't make much sense at all."

"It does if you've been dragged into an X-Men movie by your brother," I say. "I guess what you guys need is a Professor Xavier type school for gifted youngsters."

Peter gives a short laugh. "I don't know about X-Men," he says. "But there's… or used to be an organisation that could have done some good… but never did."

"Of people like you?"

"Both," Peter says. "Which actually is a good concept if it had ever been thought through. Whenever they operated, it was 'one of us, one of them.'"

"Which is us, which is them?" I ask.

He shrugs. "Depends on your viewpoint, doesn't it?"

"Is anyone actually in on this? I mean, the Pentagon, the President, or anyone?"

He hesitates before answering. "The President is. But only since very recently. Parts of the Pentagon have been. A lot of… of us are actually concerned with keeping our existence secret. Or have been. I suppose it's impossible now to turn back the clock."

"What'll happen now that millions of people saw Claire jumping off the Ferris wheel?" I ask.

"That's the question I've been asking myself since yesterday."

I don't have an answer to it, either.

* * *

About half an hour before our end of shift, we're called to an unknown in the Lower East. We pull up on scene seven minutes later, and sure enough, there's our old friend Tommy, who's actually trying to get to his feet as he sees us. Tommy's got to be the best-mannered drunk I've ever come across in this job.

He manages to get up on his first wobbly attempt, and I pull my reproachful routine, if in the more held-back, Tommy version. A drunk as decent as Tommy has earned himself the right to be rebuked with more sensitivity than other drunks.

"Tommy, Tommy," I say. "You don't learn, do you?"

"I ain't hardly drunken anything tonight, Sam," he slurs. "Seriously."

He does seem slightly less disoriented than he normally does, and I suppose if he wasn't Tommy – but a well-dressed late night club-goer – I'd let him off with a refusal form. But this being Tommy, who is a lot more helpless _and_ a lot more civil than your average late night club-goer, I'm reluctant to let him go.

I cast a look at Peter, to see what he's thinking.

Peter gives me a wink and says to Tommy, "You know, you really should come with us, Tom. I think you've drunk rather a lot."

"No, seriously," Tommy protests, wobbling again but managing to catch himself.

"I _think_," Peter repeats, stretching out his hand towards the ground at Tommy's feet, "you've drunk rather a lot."

Tommy stumbles, and from where I'm standing, two feet away, I feel a very slight shake of the ground. Peter has moved in to catch Tommy, and eases him down. "Whoa, buddy," he says, shaking his head reproachfully. "Told you, didn't I?"

Tommy's shoulders drop. "OK," he says. "Guess I'd better come."

I look at Peter with my eyebrows raised, and he grins at me.

I phone the ADRC. We drop Tommy off just before midnight, and get permission to head in.

"Well, that was useful," I observe as we finish our paperwork in the EMT room. "Sullivan's, right?"

"Yes. Not quite as effective as telling him never to touch alcohol again, cut his hair and get a job, but you have to make do with what you've got."

I laugh. "You've got one like that?"

"I used to, last summer. Got it from a cop. But I had to exchange it for another one when I had to make a quick escape."

"Sounds handy. But I guess that would have been too Hollywood."

"Probably."

"And we still make a good team."

Peter grins. "One of us, one of them, huh?" He finishes his coffee. "Seeya on Wednesday."

He slaps my hand, and leaves.

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* * *

This is the end of Hesam's secret online blog - thank you all so much for coming along for the ride! :)

I don't know if I'll write any more Heroes fanfic. As all I've done have been gap-fillers, and there won't be any more gaps to fill, I doubt it. That's a sad feeling, but it's also one of accomplishment - and I feel finally free to persue my original story again, which has been waiting patiently to be picked up ever since two New York brothers just took the limelight and pushed any other literary pursuits to the back of my to do list.

Cheers all!

PS: You'll have noticed I disregarded my own fic "Trauma" in these chapters - incorporating that would have opened a whole new can of worms, and it was never canon anyway. ;)


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